RAID Help

[sitas3]

Any RAID experts out there?

I have my new NAS (Netgear Readynas Duo) for my house arriving tomorrow along with 2x1TB hard drives. The device supposedly supports raid 0,1 and 5. Which one will most appropriate given I want to make sure that if one disk fails, I won't suffer data loss?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[nordberg]

Any RAID experts out there?

I have my new NAS (Netgear Readynas Duo) for my house arriving tomorrow along with 2x1TB hard drives. The device supposedly supports raid 0,1 and 5. Which one will most appropriate given I want to make sure that if one disk fails, I won't suffer data loss?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Given you only have two drives, you only have one option: RAID 1 (mirroring)

RAID 0, or striping, gives no resilience. RAID 5, striping with parity, needs min of 3 physical disks.

[shark_90]

Yep, RAID 1 is the only one that's going to give you resilience with two drives. The problem is, because it's mirroring the data, you'll only have 1TB of usable space.

If you bought another drive (I presume there's capacity in the unit otherwise RAID 5 wouldn't be an option?) you could create a RAID 5 array which would give you 2TB of useable space

Might be worth thinking about, as once you've got your 1TB filled up and you realise you want to expand, you'll need 1TB of storage space elsewhere to move all your data onto while you break the mirror and reconfigure as a RAID 5

[pontyslapper]

sorry to hijack...

Is it possible to setup a RAID 5 array on a bog standard IDE'd rig with a gaggle of USB/Firewire external HDs

or do I have to just jump into the expensive waters of NAS??

[sitas3]

Thanks for the info guys (and Paul!) - looks like only raid 0 and 1 as the device will only handle 2 drives. There is something called Xraid which the device handles also.