Do I still need RAID...

[King_PIN]

If I have backup 1:1? 

I have my Qnap NAS with expansion unit running Raid 5 in one big volume of roughly 100tb raw.  

I also have external backups of 118tb raw that I just add to when needed.  

My NAS is just one big media server with all my movies ripped 1:1 to it.  

I don't use it for any personal info  or storing anything of value and it doesn't face the internet. 

It's just used local to stream to the tv's in the house.  

My process is I rip directly to my Qnap and then copy the file over to my backup. 

 

Do I Still need to run it RAID? 

Does RAID give me faster performance? 

Would I just be able to turn off RAID and have QNAP rebuild to one volume? 

I obviously don't know much about how this stuff works so any help would be appreciated. 

[Needfuldoer]

RAID is insurance against having to restore from your backups. (And with that much data, you're talking days of downtime for copying files vs 5 minutes to swap a drive and let it resilver in the background.)

Edited June 7, 2022 by Needfuldoer
Except RAID 0.

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, King_PIN said:

Does RAID give me faster performance? 

Yes and no, RAID will stripe the access across the disks increasing performance. How many disks are "active" and contribute to I/O performance depends on the RAID type used. Also how good the CPU is in the NAS also affects performance.

 

Short answer is if this is data that can be easily regenerated, and you also have a backup (nice), then you can go with RAID 0 on the primary NAS which will give you 100% usable storage capacity of the disks and the best possible performance as all disks contribute to the total I/O performance and there is no RAID parity calculations so the CPU doesn't really matter.

 

RAID 5/6 you lose the capacity of the number of parity drives but also the performance of that number too, not really a big deal though compared to the RAID parity calculations involved here though.

 

Would you realistically gain much by running RAID 0 or no RAID, not really.

 

9 minutes ago, King_PIN said:

Would I just be able to turn off RAID and have QNAP rebuild to one volume? 

Probably not. I think QNAP lets you migrate between RAID types (not sure been a long time since I've used a QNAP) but turning off RAID would involve deleting all the data and creating a new array/storage pool.

[King_PIN]

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yes and no, RAID will stripe the access across the disks increasing performance. How many disks are "active" and contribute to I/O performance depends on the RAID type used. Also how good the CPU is in the NAS also affects performance.

 

Short answer is if this is data that can be easily regenerated, and you also have a backup (nice), then you can go with RAID 0 on the primary NAS which will give you 100% usable storage capacity of the disks and the best possible performance as all disks contribute to the total I/O performance and there is no RAID parity calculations so the CPU doesn't really matter.

 

RAID 5/6 you lose the capacity of the number of parity drives but also the performance of that number too, not really a big deal though compared to the RAID parity calculations involved here though.

 

Would you realistically gain much by running RAID 0 or no RAID, not really.

 

Probably not. I think QNAP lets you migrate between RAID types (not sure been a long time since I've used a QNAP) but turning off RAID would involve deleting all the data and creating a new array/storage pool.

Thanks.  This is my line of thinking.  If I can get better or the same performance and also gain another 10tb's of useable space on my NAS than I think that negates any other downside.  

In this configuration if one drive goes bad I just have to replace it and transfer (eg. Movies A-C) from my backup.  It should be much quicker from my experience of when I had to upgrade my drives and have Qnap do all the rebuilding. 

In fact is not even safer this way since I have full backup?  
 

I would have to check with the guys on r/Qnap if I can migrate from RAID 5 to RAID 0. 

 

edit: the QNAP has an i5-7500 4-core 3.4 GHz processor, Max turbo to 3.8 GHz with 16tbs of DDR 4 memory. 

[dogwitch]

also want to note something.

i have a raid 0 . a bug firmware update (on it)scewed notification up to the point. that  unless i went deep into nas setting. i would not have known a drive was going.

which i lost 5tb worth of content.

so take that into account that a rare event can and will happen.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, King_PIN said:

In this configuration if one drive goes bad I just have to replace it and transfer (eg. Movies A-C) from my backup.  It should be much quicker from my experience of when I had to upgrade my drives and have Qnap do all the rebuilding. 

If you go with RAID 0 then a single drive failure means absolutely everything is lost fyi. There are other types where this does not happen like "spans" and certain LVM configurations (I think). Strictly RAID 0 is all or nothing, no middle ground.

[King_PIN]

24 minutes ago, leadeater said:

If you go with RAID 0 then a single drive failure means absolutely everything is lost fyi. There are other types where this does not happen like "spans" and certain LVM configurations (I think). Strictly RAID 0 is all or nothing, no middle ground.

Oh.  That's not good.  I thought if one drive goes then I could just replace it and transfer the content it had on it before. 

Yeah having to replace 80tbs of data all over again is not something I want to do. 

I guess I'll just leave things the way they are.

Thank you.

[dogwitch]

10 hours ago, King_PIN said:

Oh.  That's not good.  I thought if one drive goes then I could just replace it and transfer the content it had on it before. 

Yeah having to replace 80tbs of data all over again is not something I want to do. 

I guess I'll just leave things the way they are.

Thank you.

if you have that much.. a min 2 drive failure set up is something you need.

[caraboose]

 

Do I Still need to run it RAID? 

Do you like your data? If so, yes you should run some form of RAID (not 0). 0 means you can't lose any drive.

 

Does RAID give me faster performance? 

As others have said, yes and no. 

Depends on many factors, but generally yes.

 

Would I just be able to turn off RAID and have QNAP rebuild to one volume? 

I'm not certain how QNAP works, but if you "turn off" raid, you're either breaking the array and making it unrecoverable, or you're turning off the server.