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What would be my best approach

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nheather

Occasional Visitor
I have a Synology 216, with just one 4TB - plenty for what we need.

But recently I have had a couple of mechanical hard drives fail (not in the NAS but various other computers) and that has left me a little nervous.

The disks I lost weren’t that important and I did not lose any data but made me think that if I lost the one disk in the NAS it would be a little worse.

So thinking how to protect that disk. My first thought is, that I have a spare bay so put another 4TB drive in it. Fine with the price and as I said, 4TB is plenty for my needs. What would be the best way to approach this, two disks in a RAID 1 mirror, or two independent storage pools with a backup copying the files from the main storage pool to the backup pool.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
How old is that original drive?

Either way would bring benefits if you could actually do the backup on a timely basis with the two independent disks method. :)

Another option is to get an external USB 4TB drive to do the backup instead. This would leave your working systems working. ;)

RAID 5 (and a new NAS) would be infinitely better. And you can still keep the Synology 216 as a backup for the new NAS too.
 
Go with a RAID 1. Then, also get a USB disk to backup the content. RAIDs can potentially become corrupted (very rare, but still a possibility). Ransomware can encrypt your NAS's content. A blown power supply in the NAS could nuke both hard disks by cooking them with 110V (I've had it happen many times in PCs that used craptastic ElCheap Power supply at 20$ a piece). Therefore, you need to also have an external backup of some sort.

Fortunately, the price for 4 TB of storage has gone down a lot by now. Plan ahead as to whether 4 TB will last you for a few years. If not, you can create a RAID using a larger second disk, then eventually also replace the first disk, then enlarge the capacity of your RAID to use the full capacity. (and double check that your specific Synology model does support inline capacity growth).
 
Backup, backup, backup and backup again :)

Raid/mirroring is good if only 1 drive fails. Rarely, as rmerlin says, it can fail, but more likely is a NAS hardware failure (IMO). This can be infinitely harder to recover from (and is the reason I usually buy NAS units in pairs or triplets). Also, deleting a file by accident, by virus, etc erases the original and the mirror.

Only you can place a value on what you might lose. An offline backup device or devices is the best long term approach. I keep all my critical files on multiple NAS units, in the cloud and on portable drives in my safe and at the bank safety deposit box :)
Short term (lower loss value) files I just store on a raid 1 NAS that that gets rsynced to another raid 1 or a raid 5 as backup.

A $10 usb-to-sata adapter cables quickly turns old HDDs into portable drives too! Very handy, particularly for 3.5" drives.

You will likely never regret adding a second HDD to your current NAS in any case.

Simple rules:
Raid protects against (limited) HDD failure, but not device failure. Local backups prevent against single device failure, but not malware, theft, fire, etc. Offsite backups ensure (for the most part) full recovery.
 
you can create a RAID using a larger second disk, then eventually also replace the first disk, then enlarge the capacity of your RAID to use the full capacity
+1 for the idea of getting a larger drive now. It is likely (QNAP can for sure, not 100% sure on Synology) that if you got, as an example, a 10tb drive, you could use 4tb as a mirror and the remainder as additional file storage until such time as you increase the mirror size (replacing the original 4tb drive).

The new drive could be NAS tested (WD Red, Seagate Ironwolf, etc) and have newer, better, self correcting (or at least monitoring) firmware.
 
Is the self-correcting technology really that useful nowadays?
I've had drives, once in a while, map out bad sectors, so I would definitely say yes to that question. 1 bad sector could ruin your day. :)
 

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