Raid non-drive System Failure?

[testgcd]

I'm a novice.

 

Going through the raid introduction videos I noticed lots of info about what happens  in the different RAID configurations when a drive is problematic.

 

What I'm not sure about is what happens when the drives are just fine but any of the rest of the hardware fail.

 

What I mean is that for example a Synology NAS is practically a PC with easily accessible hard disk ports, that includes a motherboard RAM, CPU etc. and with an operating system that allows the RAID configuration, package install and connectivity.

 

So what the hell happens when the hard disks are fine but the motherboard or cpu etc fail? Or when the software gets the equivalent of a blue screen of death and need a format?

 

Will I be able to take the hard drives out and put them in a new NAS and continue like nothing happened? Or I just lost access to my files?

 

[wseaton]

Yes. Usually....**  Synology drives can be transferred to another Synology.....usually. The units are basically running their own brand of Linux and using either exts4 or Btrfs file systems.

 

There's a couple big asterisks here. First, if you're using RAID 5 and the motherboard pukes there's a big chance you can have serious file system corruption. This is no different than a RAID controller failing and wiping out RAID 5 parity. It all depends on how it fails and if it's processing parity data while doing so. Another reason to avoid RAID 5 and stick to RAID 1 mirrors.

 

Not had direct experience with this, but encrypted drives can be problematic to xfer in the event of system failure. Not impossible, but will likely involve tech support.

 

 

[testgcd]

36 minutes ago, wseaton said:

Synology drives can be transferred to another Synology.....usually.

So there's no chance of me just putting them into a non-synology machine and moving on with my life? Or if Synology goes bankrupt in 2 years for example I'm screwed. Or even if it doesn't and I get a new Synology I'm not guaranteed to have my data intact using a specific RAID configuration?

 

So all this stuff about Raid being great for redundancy etc is bs... there is a 1-point-failure at the motherboard etc, that bricks the entire thing...

 

Or if I have it at RAID 1 am I guaranteed to be able to save all my data?

 

I think maybe I'm better of getting a couple of 10tb external drives and just copying every new file manually twice to these backup drives and have them in cold storage.

[Blue4130]

8 hours ago, testgcd said:

So there's no chance of me just putting them into a non-synology machine and moving on with my life? Or if Synology goes bankrupt in 2 years for example I'm screwed. Or even if it doesn't and I get a new Synology I'm not guaranteed to have my data intact using a specific RAID configuration?

 

So all this stuff about Raid being great for redundancy etc is bs... there is a 1-point-failure at the motherboard etc, that bricks the entire thing...

 

Or if I have it at RAID 1 am I guaranteed to be able to save all my data?

 

I think maybe I'm better of getting a couple of 10tb external drives and just copying every new file manually twice to these backup drives and have them in cold storage.

This is one reason why raid is not a backup, it's resiliency (uptime).