RAID and HDD options for 4-6 bays NAS

[jacoporicci]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm updating my file storage situation and I narrowed my selection to the following Synology products:

DS918+ (4 bays), DS1019+ (5 bays), DS1618+ (6 bays)

 

Now I'm in the process to pick which HDD and in what configuration I'm gonna put in the system.

 

I currently have 4TB of storage in R1 and it took me over 4 years to fill it up so I'm looking at a 8-12TB goal for this new storage.

This will mainly be personal stuff and archival of old work stuff.

 

Knowing this, these are the option I came up with but can't decide on which way to go, so I'd really appreciate if someone can share their experience.

 

Let's assume I will buy 4TB drives.

Let's also assume that this whole box is gonna be backed up on a cloud service and/or off site server.

 

I think with a 4 bay, the best solution will be a Raid 10 but I'm really struggling with the idea of losing half of my storage capacity.

Also, how risky is Raid 5 for real, that will bring me to 12TB? What's the performance hit knowing that this will just be attached to the network with 2 Gigabit LAN aggregated?

Will I be able to use the Raid 10 performance benefit with that type of connection?

 

With the 5 bay solution I can go Raid 6, but again, I don't want it to be slow. So, how slow is Raid 6? Do I really need a 2 drive redundancy?

 

With the 6 bay solution I can go Raid 10 and have a 12TB storage unit but price increases significantly.

 

This leads me to drives: should I pick 5400 or 7200 rpm drives?

Will I get a hit with 5400 RPM considering the network situation?
Will the RAID 10 make up for the slower drive?

Sorry if this is all over the place but I’m really confused on how to approach this.

 

Thanks to whoever will responds and help me clear my mind out.

 

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

9 hours ago, jacoporicci said:

Let's assume I will buy 4TB drives.

Id go bigger drives, 8-12tb seems to be the sweet spt.

 

9 hours ago, jacoporicci said:

Will I be able to use the Raid 10 performance benefit with that type of connection?

Probably not but depends on the workload.

 

10 hours ago, jacoporicci said:

With the 5 bay solution I can go Raid 6, but again, I don't want it to be slow. So, how slow is Raid 6? Do I really need a 2 drive redundancy?

Raid 6 will still be network limited with this setup.

 

10 hours ago, jacoporicci said:

This leads me to drives: should I pick 5400 or 7200 rpm drives?

DOesn't matter, your network limited.

 

Also there is much more than rpm to drive speed.

 

Id get fewer bigger drives, and expand later, id use the shr raid.

 

SIngle parity is probably fine, Id just make sure backups are good.

[jacoporicci]

10 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id go bigger drives, 8-12tb seems to be the sweet spt.

 

Probably not but depends on the workload.

 

Raid 6 will still be network limited with this setup.

 

DOesn't matter, your network limited.

 

Also there is much more than rpm to drive speed.

 

Id get fewer bigger drives, and expand later, id use the shr raid.

 

SIngle parity is probably fine, Id just make sure backups are good.

Thanks for the thorough response, definitely helped.

 

What's the correct procedure to make sure that backups are truly 1:1? I've read a couple of procedures on the web but couldn't remember what they were about.

 

Thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 hours ago, jacoporicci said:

Thanks for the thorough response, definitely helped.

 

What's the correct procedure to make sure that backups are truly 1:1? I've read a couple of procedures on the web but couldn't remember what they were about.

 

Thanks!

Normally you want to test restoring the backups oscasionally.

 

Depending on your setup, cloud backups, or a second nas are good options.