RAID 1 vs ??

[GGW]

With the price of drives as low as they are the benefits of anything but RAID 6 don't seem to be there over simple RAID 1. For 4tb of reliable storage I can put 4x2tb drives in a NAS and have 2 mirrored pairs (for NAS's that support this). This should provide good performance and come with the benefit of being able to read a drive on a Win machine if necessary (assuming FAT32) so I'm freed from being locked in to a specific vendor (and in some cases a specific model).

RAID 6 offers the benefit of being able to loose 2 drives, but as long as I maintain some form of backup for the NAS it doesn't seem like the probability of loosing 2 at once over just one between backup windows (to the NAS backup) is that great.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

 

[Brandon]

Two things here.

First, I woulnd't use Raid6 for anything with less than 6 drives, as it's a waste of space for little gain. The failure rate is so low that you would be lousing 2tb of space with almost no gain. Raid5 is the best way to go with 3+ drives in storage. It's slower than a single drive in most cases, but you can stand to have a single (1) drive fail. So long as you catch it before a second drive fails (Rare..) it will rebuild and be off to the races again.

Second, Windows doesn't play well with partitions over 2tb. Off the top of my head, the only way to make a partition bigger than that visable, is to make it a GPT drive. I'm not sure if you can do this with FAT32. I'm also not sure if FAT can even be formatted that large to be honest..

 

[claykin]

I don't know of a NAS that formats its internal disks using FAT32. EXT2/3/4 is most popular followed by ZFS and XFS file systems.

EXT2/3 can be read on a PC using a free utility such as www.fs-driver.org or http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/. No word on EXT4 Windows support yet, but its coming.

Most NAS boxes support EXT2/3 with a max 8TB volume size and 2TB single file max size. Some now support up to 16TB max volume size.

 

[GGW]

Thanks claykin & Brandon. Me thinks mirrored EXT3 on NV+ should work then.