Help with Qnap setup

[aaaariel]

Hello there,

 

I have a Qnap Ts-451 currently with 3 fresh 3TB HGST drives. I wanted to set it up and Have some trouble deciding or even understanding what could be the best setup for me.

I'm a Video editor and need the Qnap as a good backup for running projects. 

SO,

1. Since It's a backup, should I use any kind of Raid ?  (I don't mind buying another drive for something like a Raid 10 for instance)

2. If I want it to be non raid, How do I set it up ? when I go to the disk setup I only get either a raid option or a JBOD which for me seems like a bad choice since one drive failure means something between A big mess to a complete data loss.

I don't see an option to treat the Drives separately .

 

Any other thoughts ?

Thanks,

Ariel

 

 

 

[Lurick]

I think if you want to treat them separately then you would make a JBOD for each disk I believe and only put one disk in the array. I could be wrong since it's been a while.

 

As for what RAID to go with:

If you want decent performance and some level of redundancy then probably go for RAID 5

If you want more redundancy but are willing take a bit of a storage size hit then RAID 10

[Morgan MLGman]

25 minutes ago, Lurick said:

I think if you want to treat them separately then you would make a JBOD for each disk I believe and only put one disk in the array. I could be wrong since it's been a while.

 

As for what RAID to go with:

If you want decent performance and some level of redundancy then probably go for RAID 5

If you want more redundancy but are willing take a bit of a storage size hit then RAID 10

AFAIK JBOD pretty much stacks the drives together without any storage space loss, but offers no redundancy so unless you have another backup and really need the space, my advice is to not use that feature

[aaaariel]

Morgan, what would you recommend then ? one of the raids Lurick suggested ?

[Morgan MLGman]

2 minutes ago, aaaariel said:

Morgan, what would you recommend then ? one of the raids Lurick suggested ?

I suggest you use RAID 5. It's going to give you fault tolerance of 1 HDD and it will double your storage read speeds, you will lose 3GB of storage space though.

Also, you can't do RAID 10 with 3 drives, 4 is the bare minimum

[aaaariel]

5 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Also, you can't do RAID 10 with 3 drives, 4 is the bare minimum

I know, in my original post I mentioned I can buy another identical drive if that would be the best solution 

[Morgan MLGman]

2 minutes ago, aaaariel said:

I know, in my original post I mentioned I can buy another identical drive if that would be the best solution 

How much storage do you need? Do you need the configuration to be fault-tolerant or do you have a backup of the data elsewhere so all you want is storage space and performance?

 

These are the questions you need to ask yourself before making a decision here

[aaaariel]

I need a balance between the three-  Lets say -  50% Capacity, 30% Fault tolerance and 20% performance . 

I believe this sends me to the Raid 5 option but I heard many bad things about it

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, aaaariel said:

I know, in my original post I mentioned I can buy another identical drive if that would be the best solution 

RAID 5 is still a better choice than RAID 10 for your situation, if you check the product page for the NAS you'll see it does 200+ MB/s read/write which is limited by the two network ports it has. If you go with RAID 10 you're losing a lot of usable space for a very small gain in reliability, a 4 drive RAID 6 would be better than 4 drive RAID 10 as well.

[Dark]

I agree, RAID 6 would be a more suitable choice but it would require an additional disk.

 

I would go that route and then setup a storage pool with flex volume support.