Seeking advice on RAID setup

[nospamever]

Seeking advice from this forum about what is a good approach to my RAID setup.
As of now, I have the following:
1) Brand new Netgear RN316 (6-bay) with 4x 3TB and 2x4TB disks
2) 2nd hand Netgear RN104 (4-bay) with 4x 3TB disks
3) 2nd hand Netgear RN102 (2-bay) with 2x 2TB disks
4) 2nd hand Buffalo LinkStation LS-WVL (2-bay) with 2x2TB disks (able to accept 2x4TB disks)
5) 2nd hand Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 (2-bay) with 2x1TB disks (can only accept 2x1TB disks)
6) Have 3x4TB, 2x2TB and 1x1TB portable USB3.0 drives.
I like Netgear/Readynas and all 3 Netgears above are newer than the last 2.
Happy to put both Buffalo and Seagate on facebook marketplace if these are in excess of needs. Plus both are really slow anyways with only USB2.0 ports. All Netgears have USB3.0 ports.

My current setup is RAID1 across all NASs. I think I need to be smarter and learn more about redundancy, performance and backup for my home network.
I do not plan to buy anymore kit so trying to use what I have.
I am trying to be device-agnostic, meaning I can remove disks from one NAS and put it in another NAS of a different brand. That is the reason why I have not learned how to use x-raid. Not entirely sure if my reason is sound.
Order of importance for me is (1) backup (2) redundancy (3) performance. My data comprise of family pictures and videos, personal and home-office files. These equate to roughly 4TB of important data.

I am hoping to have a simple and reliable setup. Any pointers or guidance will be appreciated.
Thank you.

 

[L&LD]

That setup is neither simple nor reliable, if/when things go wrong.

I would not consider any 2x Bay 'nas' a NAS.

My approach is a single 6-bay+ or larger NAS, with drives as large as required (for current and future growth). Along with either a backup (USB-based) process, or ideally, a backup and another NAS with the same capabilities as the main one (that solves hardware issues, particularly if (NAS) hardware dies.

Synology or QNAP (I prefer the latter) if you're serious about your data safety.

The models you have listed are what I replace with the above suggestions.

 

[RMerlin]

I am trying to be device-agnostic, meaning I can remove disks from one NAS and put it in another NAS of a different brand.

Not gonna happen with any off the shelves NAS. You would need to go down the DIY route for that. For instance they tend to support different filesystems (Synology will use btrfs, while QNAP will use LVM + ext4). Also they often store their operating system and configuration on a disk partition, so moving the disks to a different brand will not work.

However within the same brand, some manufacturers like QNAP lets you move disks without too much trouble. You can take the disks from an old TS-253, and install them in a newer TS-464, and all your existing configurations will follow.

 

[nospamever]

Not gonna happen with any off the shelves NAS. You would need to go down the DIY route for that. For instance they tend to support different filesystems (Synology will use btrfs, while QNAP will use LVM + ext4). Also they often store their operating system and configuration on a disk partition, so moving the disks to a different brand will not work.

However within the same brand, some manufacturers like QNAP lets you move disks without too much trouble. You can take the disks from an old TS-253, and install them in a newer TS-464, and all your existing configurations will follow.

Thanks, the more I learn about NAS the less I want to use it. Just seemed very hard to deploy unless I sink money into it. But I have data I could not lose.

 

[RMerlin]

Thanks, the more I learn about NAS the less I want to use it. Just seemed very hard to deploy unless I sink money into it. But I have data I could not lose.

Get an off the shelves NAS from Synology or QNAP. Very easy to deploy. They both support various cloud backup services for offsite backups. And in case of hardware failure, you can order a replacement device from the same brand, plug your old disks in, and you're mostly done. I had to do it for a customer a few years ago where their QNAP died. They received a newer model within 24 hours. I went on site, moved the disks in the new NAS, reassociated their QNAP Cloud account with the new NAS' and within 30 minutes they were up and running, all their data and configuration intact.

 

[nospamever]

Get an off the shelves NAS from Synology or QNAP. Very easy to deploy. They both support various cloud backup services for offsite backups. And in case of hardware failure, you can order a replacement device from the same brand, plug your old disks in, and you're mostly done. I had to do it for a customer a few years ago where their QNAP died. They received a newer model within 24 hours. I went on site, moved the disks in the new NAS, reassociated their QNAP Cloud account with the new NAS' and within 30 minutes they were up and running, all their data and configuration intact.

Have committed to Netgear so Synology and Qnap are not options for me right now. Perhaps in the future. I am aware both these brands seem to be the favourite here.

 

[Tech9]

I do not plan to buy anymore

Have committed to Netgear

roughly 4TB of important data.

You have >20TB of mirrored NAS drives plus >16TB of USB backup drives available. The data you have to care about is ~4TB. You know better than anyone where the important data is currently located, how often it's backed up, how many copies are made and where. You have plenty of space and device options to do whatever you want. You want to stay with Netgear and don't plan to buy anything new. Your brand new NAS is actually End-Of-Life model already. What exactly advice you expect? We can't recommend anything new or DYI as per your requirements. In this case - use what you have in a way you find best.

 

[sfx2000]

Get an off the shelves NAS from Synology or QNAP. Very easy to deploy. They both support various cloud backup services for offsite backups. And in case of hardware failure, you can order a replacement device from the same brand, plug your old disks in, and you're mostly done

Yep...

QNAP/Synology just make it easy...

 

[coxhaus]

I would think if you want to move RAID disks around you could do it with Windows server. Well in the past you could. I don't think Windows workstations have RAID in them. What we did in the past was to use a drive to boot Windows server. It could be an SSD now as it did not exist back then. If you boot off the RAID then you kind of lock yourself in to where it is not moveable. Then buy the same RAID controllers and build your RAID under Windows. You should be able to move RAIDS. They will need to be defined the same and do not change order of the drives, maybe tag them. Windows naively supports software RAID in server but not workstation. Hardware RAID will work better. Use Dell or Intel controllers.

 

[sfx2000]

Just note that the more disks in an array, the higher the probability that it will have issues in the future...

Math/stats are cruel and unforgiving...

 

[sfx2000]

Brand new Netgear RN316 (6-bay) with 4x 3TB and 2x4TB disks

Netgear ReadyNAS 316 was released in 2013... and is end-of-life...

 

[coxhaus]

Yes, we did not have the high density drives that we do now. I would probably use RAID10 more now than RAID5 but it would depend.

Really with the big drives now you could with a fast controller get away with not using RAID. RAID was for bigger drives and faster access. I think 20TB is big enough if you have fast enough access, so it really depends.

Maybe if you run multiple controllers with maybe RAID1 or RAID10 then you would have fast data access if your LAN was fast enough, 10gig would not be fast enough.

 

[sfx2000]

Seeking advice from this forum about what is a good approach to my RAID setup.
As of now, I have the following:
1) Brand new Netgear RN316 (6-bay) with 4x 3TB and 2x4TB disks
2) 2nd hand Netgear RN104 (4-bay) with 4x 3TB disks
3) 2nd hand Netgear RN102 (2-bay) with 2x 2TB disks
4) 2nd hand Buffalo LinkStation LS-WVL (2-bay) with 2x2TB disks (able to accept 2x4TB disks)
5) 2nd hand Seagate BlackArmor NAS 220 (2-bay) with 2x1TB disks (can only accept 2x1TB disks)
6) Have 3x4TB, 2x2TB and 1x1TB portable USB3.0 drives.

this is basically what you have - it's a lot of gear that perhaps was useful back in the day, but keeping important data on it, you are at risk...

 

[ddaenen1]

We can whine about Synology or Qnap being better solutions but that is not going to provide an answer to the OP's question. I used to have Netgear ReadyNAS gear in the past and honestly, it was perfectly fine for storage purposes and even for running Plex.

Understanding that the hardware is somewhat aged and you do not have any other demands than having secure storage for 4Tb of data, i would only use the RN316 and put six 3Tb drives in there. This will allow you to configure Raid 50 and provides you with more than decent redundancy. You could keep the remaining two 3Tb as spares in case one fails or alternatively use the RN104 with two 3Tb and two 4Tb in RAID5 as a very simple backup solution to the RN316. ReadNAS OS will allow you to do that easily. All the other hardware is ready for the junkyard.

As already mentioned, you cannot just swap disks from one NAS to the other so forget about that.