Hello c/homelab!
My NAS currently consists of 6TB of spinning rust, one disk only. As time goes on I increasingly think about how annoying it would be to lose it to a random drive failure.
So, I recently had an idea for a new storage setup when I saw a 2TB M.2 drive for £60-70 online. Given the low price, these drives are likely low-quality and probably cacheless too, but I have a potential solution: If I bought 4 of these and set them up in RAID10, would that be a sensible way to effectively double the speed and increase redundancy?
Yes, I know it’s probably a silly idea when I can just spend more on 2 faster and more reliable drives, but I would like to at least hear from people who might have tried something similar! So what do you think?
RAIDs are for avoiding service disruption when a disk fails, not to avoid data loss.
To avoid data loss you need backups. Ideally under 3, 2, 1 rule: 3 copies, in at least 2 places, 1 of them being off-site.
I’m aware of the 321 rule for backups, but surely a mirrored disk is still technically counts as one backup?
Well, kind of. But all disks are under the same conditions. A power failure could make all of them to fail. Physical impacts affects all the same way. All can be stolen together, etc. It’s better than one disk, for sure. But it’s not a real backup.
Now, if you want to have fun setting a RAID, go ahead and post the results here. But be aware that RAIDs are not to avoid data loss.