Advice for setup of NAS RAID 0 vs RAID 5

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cemjack

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Jul 7, 2013
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New 5 bay NAS setup. 5 HD - two WD 3tb red, two seagate 3tb, one wd 1.5 tb.

What is best drive setup/recommendation?

I thought I may go RAID-0 (two wd red 3tb) for 6tb and mirror that to RAID-0 with the two seagate drives. Then use the one 1.5tb drive as a single volume by itself.

I also considered buying an additional 3 tb drive and going with RAID 5 using three drives.

Finally, it did not think it would be good to mix the wd and seagate drives into RAID-5 b/c the seagates are 7200rpm and wd reds are 5900 or so. Or can I mix the drives without problem?

I will be backing up the NAS to local computer and offsite.

Thanks.
 
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When it comes to RAID, all drives should be identical. The reason for this is that certain control mechanisms are shifted to the RAID controller which may expose intercompatibility issues between different vendor controllers. You should have either all WD drives of the same model, or all Seagate drives of the same model.

Now as to which RAID you should use, it depends on your use case.

The chance of a RAID-0 failure is proportional to the number of drives in the array. All it takes is one drive to fail and all data on the array is lost. I would never recommend putting more than 4 drives in RAID-0. Furthermore, NAS drives almost never see any performance increase from RAID-0.

RAID-5 is the crowd favorite for storage that's not subject...
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Pinhedd

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Aug 7, 2007
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When it comes to RAID, all drives should be identical. The reason for this is that certain control mechanisms are shifted to the RAID controller which may expose intercompatibility issues between different vendor controllers. You should have either all WD drives of the same model, or all Seagate drives of the same model.

Now as to which RAID you should use, it depends on your use case.

The chance of a RAID-0 failure is proportional to the number of drives in the array. All it takes is one drive to fail and all data on the array is lost. I would never recommend putting more than 4 drives in RAID-0. Furthermore, NAS drives almost never see any performance increase from RAID-0.

RAID-5 is the crowd favorite for storage that's not subject to high read/write loads. With 5 drives installed you will have the combined capacity of 4 drives, but the R/W speeds will not be stellar (it depends on the particular RAID controller used in the NAS).
 
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choucove

choucove

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May 13, 2011
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The above information from Pinhedd has you pretty well covered. Basically, if you value your data at all, you shouldn't be using RAID 0. What you were actually describing is RAID 10, which is the best RAID configuration for achieving both performance and redundancy. However, 1) all the drives in the RAID array still have to be identical, and 2) the performance benefit from this type of RAID on a simple NAS device is not going to be very beneficial as you will most likely be limited in throughput either by the NAS device and controller, or the gigabit network link.

With the current setup you have, I'd suggest making two RAID 1 arrays, using the two sets of identical drives, to mirror each drive to its same model drive. Then the one stand-alone drive you can use for non-critical data or temp files that don't need to be in a protected redundant array.
 
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