4 bay NAS which RAID?

[saffken]

Hi All,

I am not sure if there is a NAS out there that can or cannot do this function.

I have around 4.5TB of Data on two 3TB drives. For redundancy sake I want to buy two more 3TB drives, then have all four 3TB drives in a single NAS device.

I then want the the NAS to back up, Drive 1 to Drive 2, and then also back up Drive 3 to Drive 4.

Is this do able?

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a NAS enclosure that supports this or tell me which version of R.A.I.D I need for the NAS to have to handle this functionality.

I know I could get two separate duo enclosures but is more messy I think.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

 

[thiggins]

why don't you just set up two RAID 1 volumes?

 

[teknojnky]

I have around 4.5TB of Data on two 3TB drives. For redundancy sake I want to buy two more 3TB drives, then have all four 3TB drives in a single NAS device.

I then want the the NAS to back up, Drive 1 to Drive 2, and then also back up Drive 3 to Drive 4.

Is this do able?

yes, however;

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a NAS enclosure that supports this or tell me which version of R.A.I.D I need for the NAS to have to handle this functionality.

first of all, what you propose is neither redundant, nor RAID.

it is individual disks, backing up to other individual disks.

which is not necessary a bad thing, but it is different than raid.

as Tim mentioned, with most 4 bay raid devices, you can setup manual raid arrays with two raid 1 arrays (ie mirroring). Or even 4 individual disks, with which you can setup backup jobs on the device to copy from one disk to another disk. However, none of the devices are designed to do this and let you add/remove disks at willy nilly.

Raid 1 arrays will keep both disks in sync together in real time, so that if either disk fails, your data will still be available.

Raid is not designed for manual syncing (ie backup 1 disk to another disk), nor is it designed to sync up then pull one of the disks out for backup purposes.

If, as you have asked, really want to back up disks, then possibly a better solution would be a 2 or 4 bay device + 2 external drives. When you backup to external drives, you can safely remove the ext drives and access them directly from a PC/laptop or store them off site.

I know I could get two separate duo enclosures but is more messy I think.

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Well, storing lots of data is messy. And the more data, the messier it gets and the more expensive it gets..

RAID itself is not a backup solution or a replacement for backups. If there is only one copy of your data, even if its on a raid array, its not backed up.

You have the right idea about having multiple copies of your data on separate disks.

Most experienced NAS/Raid users have their primary raid/nas device, then backups to either external drives and/or a secondary raid/nas device.

Hope that helps and doesn't confuse you further.