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Just picked up a synology drive, raid 1 or not??

M

mpovolo

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 30, 2010
41
0
I have 2 2TB drives installed. Was planning on setting them up as seperate volumes and using 4TB for storage. Is this a bad idea or should I set it up as raid1. I was planning on backing up through USB or onto the second drive if the built in software lets me do that.

thanks
 
I have 2 2TB drives installed. Was planning on setting them up as seperate volumes and using 4TB for storage. Is this a bad idea or should I set it up as raid1. I was planning on backing up through USB or onto the second drive if the built in software lets me do that.

thanks
Click to expand...

Hi
I just got a Synology Diskstation with 4 drives. I did not used RAID; I set them up as separate volumes. I use the first two drives (HD1 and HD2) as backups for my macs, archive, file serving, and media server. I use the other two drives (HD3 and HD4) as copies of HD1 and HD2.
I did not use RAID because I think that with the above setup I am accomplishing almost the same thing, but without the RAID complexities involved (more things may fail). As far as I understand it, the only thing I am missing is mirroring, which I do not need; I run the backups twice a day.

The built-in software lets you do backups; there are several options, and is not hard to set it up.
 
The advantage of RAID 1 is that it gives you redundancy, you do lose 50% of your storage, but you gain protection from a drive failure. You can use each drive separately ,but if one fails you lose whatever was on it, with RAID 1, if a drive fails, your data is still safe.
 
My thoughts...

RAID 1 (mirroring) does give you protection from a single drive failure; you can continue operating as normal with no downtime with the tradeoff that you double your cost of storage. Two 2TB drives in RAID1 will give you 2TB of space (roughly).

RAID1 does NOT protect you from accidental deletion, data corruption or catastrophic failure/loss of both drives. You still need to do regular backups and keep a backup set offsite in case of fire/flood/theft/etc.

It's best to think of RAID1 as a way to protect system availability from drive failure, not so much to prevent data loss from drive failure.

The above is my opinion; I'm sure others may hold different opinions.
 
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