It make no sense today for me anymore…I found more downside than real use of my RAID5 array.
My setup: 5 disks of 22TB in Raid 5
- Data Organising is estimated to 20 days!
- Rebuild time of RAID5 is unknown never had to do (yet) :-)
- Disks never sleep in BTFRS, power cost is here 0.30 per kWh
- Constant noise of 5 disk clicking instead of only one or two when using
- Do I need 80TB of continuous stiorage? Not really with 2700 movies= 12TB, 8000 TVShow episode= 14TB, most is still in h264 few in h265 and really really few in AV1 (fantastic by the way)
- I dont care about Media, and rebuild everything on a 10GB Fiber most of it automatically. Most of my private stuff is on 3-2-1 encrypted anyway
- High availability is not a topic, I’m alone using this box. And even, my Homelab is best effort not 24/7
I have another NAS full SSD, with 8 SSD but I hate the nature of RAID in SSD: they die unexpected most of the time. I prefer to lose 4TB then put 30TB at risks if 2 or more SSD decide to stop working
So maybe duplicating on another disk in a mirror (rsync) is maybe better for me
So do I.
It’s just that I use btrfs, mergerfs, or lvms to pool storage. Not RAID.
Making changes to my storage setup is far easier using these options, much more so than RAID.
Mergerfs especially makes adding or removing capacity truly trivial, with the only lengthy processes involved being bog-standard file transfers.
Hard drive storage is pretty cheap. And the effort it takes to make changes to a raid volume as my needs change over the years, just isn’t worth the savings.
How often do you change your storage setup? I’ve configured everything once like 5 years ago and haven’t touched it since. I can add larger disks in pairs and the Synology does some LVM-/mdraid-magic to add the newly available free space as RAID1 until I add a third larger disk and it remodels it to RAID5.
How do you handle parity with MergerFS? Or are all your storage partitions mirrored?
Not really - especially, if you’re looking for CMR drives. And any storage increase needs at least 2 disks with basically no (ethical) way to get any money back for the old ones.
Every year or so.
My NAS is self-built.
I used to buy one more drive whenever my pools would start getting full. I’m now in a place where I can discard data about as fast as I get more to store, I don’t predict needing new drives until one fails.
I’ve re-arranged my volumes to increase or decrease parity many times after buying drives or instead of buying drives.
Mergerfs makes access easy, the underlying drives are either with or without parity pairs, and I have things arranged so that critical files are always stored with mirroring, while non-critical files are not.
Interesting! Thank you for that insight. I might adopt some methods for when I finally replace the Synology with a new NAS (which will definitely not be another Synology device!).