Building a NAS, need a bit of advice

[Aleran]

Now that my wife has picked up a laptop, my circa 2009 desktop is available to become a storage server for the network, so i can finally shut down my desktop at nights.

 

so, in the network we have media in 5x 2tb drives, totaling 7.6tb of media. ive migrated all game files and cache over to SSDs on both machines over the last few years, so the drives are free to move once emptied.

 

I have purchased 2x6tb wd red drives for use in the nas, my question is, is there any point in purchasing a third for parity? i've read articles here and there indicating that raid 10 is the only real solution with drives over 1tb in size. i was initally considering a raid 5 for some parity. i plan to install freenas on the machine (q6600, 4gb ddr 1333, 8 sata headers, 650w psu) then stuff all five of the current 2tb drives in once i migrate the data into the volume created by the two 6tb drives. i'll be using a triplicate scheme for critical data like family photos(450gb total). one copy on my wife's laptop, one copy on the NAS, one copy on a passport drive out at the family farm. everything else is bulk media storage, So i was planning on using them straight or in raid 5 for extra volume. i'll also be migrating deluge and couchpotato/plex/sonarr to this machine assuming the supported plugins function well.

[Electronics Wizardy]

With 4 drives, id go raid 5. There is a chance of losing data in a restore, but thats why we have backups, RIGHT...

 

 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

With 4 drives, id go raid 5. There is a chance of losing data in a restore, but thats why we have backups, RIGHT...

 

 

Also when a rebuild fails the array isn't lost and neither is the data, there is just corruption beyond what can be compensated for (which could be tiny). You can still copy all the data off the array, minus the corrupted data, plus go to your backups. You do have to delete/re-initialize the array wiping the data but you get to choose when to do it. 

[Mr_Flynn]

If you're planning to use FreeNAS, don't use hardware RAID (freenas won't be able to properly check and prevent corruption on the disks). Put the drives into a RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 pool through Freenas. These modes are like RAID 5 and 6 respectively, but with a far better anti-corruption feature set.