I bought one of these and now I’m unclear what I should be doing regarding RAID. Can I not add drives later?
I’m not sure if I’m looking at old data but I’m starting to feel stupid. I’m not super tech literate but I’m typically above average. Also a lot of doom and gloom telling me redundancy isn’t a backup like I don’t already know.
It’s still in box and considering returning it.
Any advice? Sorry for the vague question.
there are a bunch of things to consider which is why it seems so complicated. things like, do you prefer more storage or more live redundancy (aka how many disks do you want to lose before it can’t recover)? There are also performance concerns you may or may not care about.
Hopefully someone familiar with QNAP’s idiosyncrasies chimes in as it sometimes matters when making these choices.
If you don’t care about all that, just want solid redundancy and don’t need the most blistering performance raid5 is always a good go-to. You will hear a lot of back and forth on other mixes that work as well and they are worth considering if you care about any of the factors I’ve mentioned.
Also something to keep in mind, if you plan to do full cloud backups you can play with your arrangement a bit and figure out what you want. Simply rebuild your array and load the cloud backup. Its time consuming so only go there if you really want to try other configs.
I plan on using it mostly for media (plex). RAID5 sounded good to me but the more I read I started getting scared. The complete lack of redundancy with RAID0 seems bad if I understand correctly I’ll lose everything if one drove fails.
I was riding the google gsuite unlimited storage gravy train which is now over. I have a good 30 to 40 TB to download. With that much data backing up on the cloud does not seem practical. I’d back up plex database and other configuration files and such.
Raid5 is not as complicated as it seems to be, people going 1/0 prefer the performance increase though that varies based on hardware. For general use raid5 is easy to setup and not hard to understand as you don’t really need to understand it beyond noting how quickly you need to move when X-number of disks start to fail.
If you are backing up there is nothing to worry about other than be sure to buy drives suited to your usage. If you are going SSD the type of memory used will matter quite a bit. Pick your hardware right and an array of any config will run reliably for years to come.
You can add drives later and you can also change the RAID type later when adding a drive.
Online RAID Level Migration supports the following RAID migrations:
Single drive to RAID 1
RAID 1 to RAID 5
RAID 5 to RAID 6
But you can only migrate to a different RAID within that scheme when adding 1 drive, as the new drive will be used to create that new RAID level. Changing the RAID type otherwise will require making every fresh and all data will be removed.
QNAP HowTo: https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tutorial/article/online-raid-level-migration
Ok, I think I get all that. It seems I was just over thinking things. Thanks.
