All these RAIDs got me confused

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

I am experimenting with my Raspberry Pi and I want to create NAS server out of it. I am thinking about 2 or 4 drives but i got completely lost in all those RAID types. Is it better to have just 2 drives with RAID 1 or 4 drives with RAID 5? Or do you have some better solution for me?

Yea, i know i could buy ready NAS server but where is fun in that?

Thanks for you replies in advance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much storage do you need?

 

Id go fewer drives if you can, for ease of upgrade, and lower power, and lower noise.

[Vishera]

RAID 1 just "copies" one drive to the other,which mean that both drives will have the same data inside,Drive 0 = Drive 1,you lose half of the capacity with no performance boost.

 

RAID 5 use all the drives and gives a performance boost,using the pairity method you will lose the size of only one drive.

 

 

I personally prefer RAID 5.

[Electronics Wizardy]

11 minutes ago, Vishera said:

RAID 1 just "copies" one drive to the other,which mean that both drives will have the same data inside,Drive 0 = Drive 1,you lose half of the capacity with no performance boost.

You normally get a read performanc boost in raid 1 normally as you can read from it basically like how you would read from raid 0 with half the data from each drive.

[minibois]

RAID 1 with 2 drives: lose 50% of capacity for redundancy. You can lose up to 1 drive (of 2).

RAID 5 with 4 drives: lose 25% of your capacity. You can lose up to 1 drive (of 4).

 

With both these solutions you could lose up to 1 drive and be fine, although rebuilding the RAID can take a toll on drives not made for such tasks.

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

You normally get a read performanc boost in raid 1 normally as you can read from it basically like how you would read from raid 0 with half the data from each drive.

Well, i don't really care about performance with 100 Mb ethernet. As for storage, i don't plan to aim any higher than 5 TB. At least not now.

I am just getting into enthusiast side of things.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

Well, i don't really care about performance with 100 Mb ethernet. As for storage, i don't plan to aim any higher than 5 TB. At least not now.

I am just getting into enthusiast side of things.

Really try to get gigabit networking if you can, its basically the same price, and so much faster.

 

For that price, just get 1 or 2 8tb hdds.

 

Whats your backup plan?

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

3 minutes ago, minibois said:

RAID 1 with 2 drives: lose 50% of capacity for redundancy. You can lose up to 1 drive (of 2).

RAID 5 with 4 drives: lose 25% of your capacity. You can lose up to 1 drive (of 4).

 

With both these solutions you could lose up to 1 drive and be fine, although rebuilding the RAID can take a toll on drives not made for such tasks.

What do you mean by toll? Will it burn my Pi to a crisp or it will just take ages?

[Vishera]

Just now, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

What do you mean by toll? Will it burn my Pi to a crisp or it will just take ages?

It can "burn" the hard drives to a crisp if they are not built for it,not your Pi.

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Whats your backup plan?

I just want to make server, where my parents can store some important and buisness stuff. They need to access it quite often and they are scared that their computers can die anytime. I think it may be easier than connecting some external drives.

So yeah, i dont need any overwhelming performance.

[minibois]

Just now, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

What do you mean by toll? Will it burn my Pi to a crisp or it will just take ages?

No, it's more like the drives.

When your drives need to rebuild the array, that's a lot of reads on the drive (and thus rotations on the disk). Let's hope it will be years before any drive failure occurs, thus a lot of power-on time on all your drives.

Doing so many reads on a drive in a relatively short time can take a toll on the drives..

 

I'm probably not explaining this very well, I'm not that good at this stuff..

This video explains it a little better:

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

I just want to make server, where my parents can store some important and buisness stuff. They need to access it quite often and they are scared that their computers can die anytime. I think it may be easier than connecting some external drives.

So yeah, i dont need any overwhelming performance.

Really, if you want something simple for others, id really try to do a cloud solution as its much more reliable, and simple to use, and your not the tech support.

 

BUt even with basic use 100mbit will be slow.

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

5 minutes ago, Vishera said:

It can "burn" the hard drives to a crisp if they are not built for it,not your Pi.

But drives created for NAS should be ok, right?

Edited December 6, 2019 by LifeIsCrappyGame
I SUCK AT ENGLISH

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

But drives created for NAS should be ok, right?

Nas drives are best for this use.

 

Normal drives will work fine as well, with the potiental of a slightly higher failure rate. Id personally get the cheaper external drives and shuck them, as the savings is more than the prediced increased failure rate.

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

So there isn't clear answer which RAID is better? I guess I'll just flip the coin

[Vishera]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

Nas drives are best for this use.

 

Normal drives will work fine as well, with the potiental of a slightly higher failure rate. Id personally get the cheaper external drives and shuck them, as the savings is more than the prediced increased failure rate.

Normal drives probably can't handle the stress of rebuilding an array,i am not sure about NAS grade drives,

Data center grade drives should do the job.

[Vishera]

Just now, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

So there isn't clear answer which RAID is better? I guess I'll just flip the coin

RAID 5 has more capacity and more performance than RAID 1.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Vishera said:

Normal drives probably can't handle the stress of rebuilding an array,i am not sure about NAS grade drives,

Data center grade drives should do the job.

Rebuilding a array is the same stress as reading all the data on the drive, so nothing extra. A normal drive can read all the data without error, so its not like it will just fail on a consumer drive.

 

1 minute ago, LifeIsCrappyGame said:

So there isn't clear answer which RAID is better? I guess I'll just flip the coin

It depends on your use. Since speed doesn't matter for you and you don't need much space, raid 1 seems better here.

[LifeIsCrappyGame]

Thanks for your oppinions guys

[AngryBeaver]

So choosing raids comes down to what you want. Do you want redundancy? Do you want increased speed? How many drives/usable space do you need?

 

Depending on how you answer those questions the recommendation can shift drastically. For example if you just want speed, no redundancy and don't want to sacrifice space... then raid 0 is best. If you want no added speed, redundancy and don't care your space is halved then you can use raid 1.  The other raid setups are all about finding the balance on speed, and drives used for redundancy (how many can fail before you lose it all).