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Synology DS920+ NAS Drives and RAID 1

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NAS8TB

Occasional Visitor
I have a DS920+ with four bays. All HDD’s below are same model WD Red Plus 14TB drives.

Drives 1 & 2 are defined as RAID 1.
Drive 3 is not yet initialized
Drive 4 is defined as JBOD.
Drive 5 is an external WD Elements HDD connected to the DS920+ via USB. I use Synology “USB Copy” from Drive 1 to Drive 5 using incremental updates only which runs overnight.

Folders on Drives 1 & 2 (RAID 1). Excluding the DOCUMENTS folder, all other folders are mapped to PLEX.
  • DOCUMENTS
  • MOVIES
  • TV SHOWS
  • MUSIC
  • PICTURES
  • VIDEOS
Folders on Drive 4 (JBOD) and Drive 5 (external to NAS)
  • DOCUMENTS
  • MOVIES
  • TV SHOWS
  • MUSIC
  • PICTURES
  • VIDEOS
QUESTION: How to use Drive 3 (NAS).
  • Should I keep the non-initialized Drive as a hot swappable Drive to replace Drive 1 or 2 when/if either of those fail? I’m not interested in using other RAID types at this time.
-or-
  • Should I include Drive 3 into the RAID 1 array along with Drives 1 & 2? I believe more than one Drive may be included in a RAID 1 array. Correct?
 
If you want to use 3 hard disks in a NAS with redundancy, then RAID 5 is what you want. The size of the RAID will be N-1. All the drives should be the same size to use them at the fullest or the RAID will be the size of the smallest drive across drives.
 
If you want to use 3 hard disks in a NAS with redundancy, then RAID 5 is what you want. The size of the RAID will be N-1. All the drives should be the same size to use them at the fullest or the RAID will be the size of the smallest drive across drives.
I've only used RAID 1 in the past, but RAID 5 does make the best sense in this case. Many thanks...
 
Late to the party, but dealing with these type of questions and raid since 1993...

I would make drive 3 jbod and a manual copy of drive 4 that you can 'sacrifice' if need be if drive 1/2 fail to restore that raid 1. If you didn't have a raid1 on drive1 & 2, you could manually do anything you wanted with the drives, and after years of working with raid5, et al, I run all my drives jbod--just easier that way.
 

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