What RAID type to use

[Zalosath]

Hi,

 

I recently got a NAS and goodness me has it been a pain in the backside. All I want is the full amount of storage (don't care for redundancy with the data I'm storing).

 

It's a Synology DS218play and it has only a few options:

Basic • JBOD • RAID 0 • RAID 1 • SHR

 

The problem began here, I wanted to add 2 drives to the NAS, but I already had data on one of the drives (4TB), so in order to put it into the NAS I had to first transfer all the files from that to the other drive I wanted to put in (2TB) as I didn't have enough storage elsewhere. So I did that, all fine, put the 4TB in the NAS and set it up for the Basic RAID as it felt like the right option, nope, not the right option as you can't add drives to it as I later found out AFTER transferring all the data back to it. I'm now swapping over to SHR, again, no idea if that's the right decision, will that allow me to have the full 6TB of data? If not then what will? RAID 0?

 

Hopefully I'll get it right this time! It's not the best idea to be hammering the drives 24/7 like I am now :facepalm:

 

Cheers!

 

EDIT: Potentially just JBOD? After actually Googling what that meant...

Edited August 1, 2022 by Zalosath
google-fu

[Electronics Wizardy]

You want jbod here. It lets you add drives of mixed sizes and get the full capacity.

[Oshino Shinobu]

JBOD. If you don't care about redundancy and want to be able to add drives as you please without a rebuild, you'll need to go for JBOD.

[Zalosath]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You want jbod here. It lets you add drives of mixed sizes and get the full capacity.

Just now, Oshino Shinobu said:

JBOD. If you don't care about redundancy and want to be able to add drives as you please without a rebuild, you'll need to go for JBOD.

Thank you both! 

[Dutch_Master]

Do keep in mind that although adding a drive is easy, replacing one is effectively impossible on a JBOD.

 

But you already said you don't care about your data, so it won't be an issue to loose everything when you replace even a single drive.

[Zalosath]

9 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

Do keep in mind that although adding a drive is easy, replacing one is effectively impossible on a JBOD.

 

But you already said you don't care about your data, so it won't be an issue to loose everything when you replace even a single drive.

Could you explain this further?

Will I lose data on the drives that didn't fail? That'd be an inconvenience.

 

If I did go for redundancy, what's the best option here? I would like to keep as close to 6TB of storage as possible, 5TB would be a semi-minimum.

[tikker]

45 minutes ago, Zalosath said:

Could you explain this further?

Will I lose data on the drives that didn't fail? That'd be an inconvenience.

 

If I did go for redundancy, what's the best option here? I would like to keep as close to 6TB of storage as possible, 5TB would be a semi-minimum.

The DS218play is a 2-bay NAS, so 5 TB with redundancy would lead you to two 5 TB drives in RAID1 or its Synology equivalent.