Synology DS212j raid suggestions

[cathy88]

Hi guys,

Just got my Synology DS212j, but I haven't managed to decide if I want to use raid or not.

I am planning on having 2x3TB hard drives, and am considering if I should use Raid 0 or not.

My only concern is if I do use Raid 0 and when one drive does fail I lose potentially 6TB worth of data. If I do a normal set up I lose only 3TB (given only one fails). Having said this my last 3 hard drives have never failed me.

Is Raid 1 mirroring recommended? I kind of bought a dual bay because I wanted more storage.

Also there seems to be some kind of Synology Hybrid Raid, is that any good?

Can someone suggest me what I should be using?

Primary use would be for storing movies and videos for the whole house, and frequently used to watch movies and videos off it from a tv box

Thanks in advance

 

[sinoue]

Not sure what happened to my last reply, but briefly:

If your media collection is under 3TB I would format the drives SHR (Synology Hybrid Raid). It protects your data if one of the drive fails and it makes it easy to swap in a new drive without issues. Adding a larger drive later is also very easy when using SHR formatting. This is basically RAID 1 mirroring but with added flexibility.

If your media collection is going to need the full 6TB in a single mountable volume (like one large continuous media collection library) the you would need to use RAID 0. Raid 0 is normally used for data performance on locally accessible drives for use in video editing, etc. Raid 0 like you mentioned is suspect to catastrophic failure where if 1 drive fails you lose all your data since the data is interleaved between the 2 drives. Gigabit switchers can't match RAID 0 speeds without a custom link aggregation setup so don't do it for performance reasons on streaming movies from your NAS.

If you just want 3TB storage on each drive for a total of 6tb of storage you can just format each drive separately, but you'll have to make sure you manage your backups since your NAS isn't going to give you any protection. You'll also have to know to switch volumes to access different content stored on the other drive.

 

[blevins321]

I'd do Raid 0, but get a set of external hard drives to go with it, and use the automatic backup feature.

 

[monsieurpaul]

If some of your data are going to be only on the DS, you need to backup them. And RAID is not backup. RAID 1 allows drive redundancy, but if the NAS fails, you may loose all your data.

SHR is a kind of RAID 5. On the DS212j it doesn't differ from RAID 1 because it's a 2-bay NAS.

What I would do with a DS212j and 2 x 3 To drives:

- 1 drive in the NAS
- the other in a USB enclosure connected to the NAS. You'll need to check the Synology site for a compatible USB enclosure.

 

[cathy88]

I will need all 6TB of space for data storage. It doesn't matter if they are one volume or two. Should I just do a normal set up, since raid 0 speed wont be noticeable through the network? And is less risky i wud only lose 3Tb data at anytime. Won't be doing any backing up at this stage as hdd is expensive