Can a NAS support 3 independent disks?

Dave Grant · Jan 3, 2014

Is it possible to have 3 disks in a 4 bay NAS, without any RAID (or JBOD) configuration?

I just want to be able to access each disk as a separate drive, and add/remove disks as needed.

For example, I might usually have Disk 1 and Disk 2 installed as drives F and G, and then, every few weeks, add Disk 3 (as drive H), copy files from Disk 2 to Disk 3, and then remove Disk 3 again.

Is such a configuration possible?

popatim · Jan 3, 2014

While that seems like a good idea what would happen is that you would copy stream files to your local pc and then back to the nas, basically halving your performance due to the network speed. You'd probably be better off adding in a removeable HDD bay into your pc and writing directly to it. I cant think of a cheap nas that can do disk to disk copies.

edit - another option is to pickup a nas with usb3/esata ports and an external usb3/esata drive and use the built in backup feature to write to the external. I'm pretty sure most nas's can handle that.

Dave Grant · Jan 4, 2014

Thanks. I wasn't sure about the disk to disk copy, so that helps.

I was considering buying a 4 bay Synology DS413j. It's not particularly expensive, so I suppose it won't support disk to disk copying. Is that right?

The attached USB3 drive seems like a good option.

However, it would still be good to know if I can have multiple independent disks in a NAS, so can anybody help me on that point please?

Synology seem to support a "basic" non-RAID configuration, but I'm not sure if you can do that with multiple disks, and it would also be good to know if other vendors support such a configuration.

Search

Can a NAS support 3 independent disks?

Dave Grant

Honorable

popatim

Titan

Dave Grant

Honorable

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page