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RAID 5,6, or 10

Hi,

So looking for some opinions here on how to best setup my NAS from those with more experience than me.

 

I've got a 4 bay QNAP NAS which I've filled with 4 10tb IronWolf drives.  The primary use for this NAS will be a Plex media server, with a side of files will also be copied here.  The NAS won't be a backup, but I will be doing a nightly Robocopy of some folders on my PC and laptop to it.  These will mostly be just an updated copy of my OneDrive folder, some photos, etc.  Nothing on the NAS won't exist elsewhere.

 

I've had recommendations for RAID 5, 6, and 10 - previously I had this setup running as RAID 10 which seemed fine.  If I were to lose the RAID, I'd be upset, but not devastated.  All four drives were bought at the same time, from the same retailer, which probably wasn't the best choice.  From experience, it takes about ~2 weeks to receive a replacement drive from Seagate under warranty, so not sure how long a RAID would survive should a drive die.

 

I was leaning more towards RAID 5 for the added storage, or 6 for the added safety of any two drives dying.  But wondered if RAID 6 would impact the life span of the drives with so many more read/writes than the other options.

 

Heat may be an issue as I'm currently in Australia; the NAS will be sitting next to my desk which, when I'm in the room, will have both fan and AC on it, but in the "summer" ambient temps can be ~30C or higher.

 

Hopefully I've answered all the obvious questions.

 

Thanks for your time and input ;)
Happy New Year!

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If you can only have up to 4 drives installed there's not much point in opting for RAID6 over RAID10. Really the additional parity writes aren't significant enough to be of concern. It's actually preferred for people who really want the fault tolerance. A drive will die naturally faster than it will exceed it's write life expectancy due to RAID6 parity bits.

 

With proper backups in place and seeing as how you can only install 4 disks and the use case of streaming media and general file server I'd use RAID5. It's a balance of usable storage with some fault tolerance. If this concerns you you could buy one extra disk to use as a cold spare.

 

RAID10's benefit over RAID6 would be IOPS. This is great when hosting VMs. If your choice was only 6 or 10 using 4 drives I'd opt for 10. Better performance.

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Id go raid 5. The change of a dual drive failure is rare, and if that happens then just restore backups in that very rare case.

 

Also the ure rate issue is much less of a problem that others make make it seem. Its way under the rated spec of the drives, and if there is a ure during a rebuild it will just skip the small bad chunk.

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3 hours ago, ImmortalArashi said:

Heat may be an issue as I'm currently in Australia; the NAS will be sitting next to my desk which, when I'm in the room, will have both fan and AC on it, but in the "summer" ambient temps can be ~30C or higher

One of the simplest ways of reducing the HDD temperatures would be to...let the NAS spin them down when they're idle. Besides that, it doesn't seem like HDD temperature really affects failure-rates as long as the temperatures are within the margins reported by the manufacturer -- https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of the human arm and commonly thrust into somebody’s pocket.

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