Is RAID necessary for this setup?

[aneil1998]

I currently have a NAS running plex and a lonely 3tb desktop drive that has 150gb remaining. I'm looking at getting 2 4tb seagate nas drives but was wondering if i should put it in RAID 1 or 0 or to keep the drives separate.

 

The only advantage I see with raid 1 is redundancy but i'll be backing it up using backblaze and i don't mind downloading the files if a drive fails

 

The system is a dual core amd system so I don't know if i should use software raid, get a raid card, run the drives separately or upgrade the amd system.

Edited September 20, 2018 by aneil1998
added 3 more words to the topic

[homeap5]

The only reason (IMO) using NAS at home is to made your data safer. Otherwise you can just put HDD into your PC and share folders - works basically the same. So Raid 1 seems to be better option, but if you don't care about safety - sure, Raid 0 is what you're looking for.

[aneil1998]

Just now, homeap5 said:

The only reason (IMO) using NAS at home is to made your data safer. Otherwise you can just put HDD into your PC and share folders - works basically the same. So Raid 1 seems to be better option, but if you don't care about safety - sure, Raid 0 is what you're looking for.

Would there be any performance issues with software raid 0 on the cpu? it's an amd a4 6300 i believe so it's a single core with "hyper-threading"(i don't know what amd calls their version of this). I plan on changing out the cpu eventually or just getting used server hardware on ebay but the motherboards are expensive

[homeap5]

Performance issues? On NAS? Unless you have double lan connected or 10-gigabit ethernet - your NAS will be still limited to 1 gigabit, so it's something around 100 MB/s max, so your speed remains the same with Raid 0 or without. Raid is not CPU-hungry btw. so it will work even on crappy pc.

[Bigman397]

Raid0 is striping, there is no redundancy. This is purely for performance, do not store important data on a raid0 without external backups.

 

Raid1 is mirroring which is what you want for basic 2 drive setups.

 

Raid5 for parity with 3+ drives, not for use with large drives.

Raid6 for dual parity with 4+ drives, this is the optimal choice for protecting data in large datasets.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

18 minutes ago, Bigman397 said:

...Raid6 for dual parity with 4+ drives, this is the optimal choice for protecting data in large datasets.

RAID (1 on up) is redundancy only, NOT a backup. All redundancy does is to protect against loss should one or more drives (depending on the kind of RAID) die while allowing continuous operation. RAID will not protect against user error (such as accidental deletion), hardware theft, hardware damage (such as from dropping, power surges blowing through any surge protction you may have, catastrophic PSU failure, etc.), viruses and malware, floods, fire, etc. Only backups that are kept powered down and disconnected from the computer (except when updating the backup) can keep data reasonably safe.

 

For data to be reasonably safe, it must exist in three places. For most people, this means the computer, onsite backup drives, and offsite backup drives. While a NAS can be used as a backup (but only if it is kept powered down and disconnected from the computer except when updating it), if the data on the NAS is the only copy of the data, then the NAS is not a backup and needs two separate backups: one onsite and one offsite.