NAS Raid Noob Question/ Help

[Stuart21]

I used to stream all my movies over my wifi router w/ usb port with a WD 2tb HDD. Well the usb enclosure quit on me but the drive is still good. So instead of buying a new usb enclosure I figured I would go with buy NAS if i could find a deal. Well i was able to pick this one up for 90 yesterday on amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004UBU3SY/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

Now my question is I have the 1-2tb drive and 2-1tb drives sitting around just as spares. I currently have like 800 gb worth of stuff and its going to be a long time before I even get close to 2tb so should i do Raid 0 with the 2-1tb drives and throw the 2tb hard drive in an extra external and use that to kind of back my library?

Appreciate any input you have I was just getting tired of dealing with the buggy router and have to connect to the usb through readyshare and figured a System like this would be a lot faster and more convenient. Also going to eventually look into instal xbmc or plex whichever so that I can watch movies without having to run iTunes.

Thanks

 

[nuckinfutz]

RAID 0 is only going to give you speed but if you are primarily storing movies and music (that don't require speed) then it's probably best to avoid RAID 0 and just mirror the drives.

 

[maturola]

it is all depend on what is important to you. Raid 0 would give you a total of 2TB of space and increase write/read speeds, but if any of the 2 drive failed, your data would be compromise.

Personally, for media like movies, musics and stuff like that I don't see the benefice of going for Raid 0

 

[Stuart21]

It's just for streaming movies so speed is not that important to me. So should i drop the 2 tb and one of the 1 tb in there so I will have a total of 3 tb?

Thanks for the help guys

Do drives not last as long when you put them in raid or something?

 

[nuckinfutz]

It's just for streaming movies so speed is not that important to me. So should i drop the 2 tb and one of the 1 tb in there so I will have a total of 3 tb?

Thanks for the help guys

Do drives not last as long when you put them in raid or something?

No it's just that in RAID 0 you double your chances for failure and data loss requiring you to use those other drives as backup. RAID 1 is going to give you a higher degree of protection and still gives proper performance.

 

[Panch0]

Now my question is I have the 1-2tb drive and 2-1tb drives sitting around just as spares. I currently have like 800 gb worth of stuff and its going to be a long time before I even get close to 2tb so should i do Raid 0 with the 2-1tb drives and throw the 2tb hard drive in an extra external and use that to kind of back my library?


Thanks

I agree with the other posters that RAID 0 is not necessary for your uses and introduces a higher chance of failure. However, you have a really good plan in using your 2TB drive as a backup! A safer setup would be setting the 2 x 1TB drives up as a RAID 1 and still using the 2TB drive for backup, but that only leaves you 200GB free space to grow into.

As long as you set up a good back-up solution, I would go with the RAID 0 setup as you mentioned.

Not sure if you are aware of this, but anytime you are setting up a RAID Set, you should use matching drives. Same manufacturer, same size, same model, same revision, same firmware, same batch if you can manage it. You can sett up an array with with mismatched drives, but chance of failure is then increased. If your existing drives are mismatched, you might want to consider some other setup, like JBOD which is also supported by your linked enclosure.

 

[markfc]

I agree with the other posters that RAID 0 is not necessary for your uses and introduces a higher chance of failure. However, you have a really good plan in using your 2TB drive as a backup! A safer setup would be setting the 2 x 1TB drives up as a RAID 1 and still using the 2TB drive for backup, but that only leaves you 200GB free space to grow into.

As long as you set up a good back-up solution, I would go with the RAID 0 setup as you mentioned.

Not sure if you are aware of this, but anytime you are setting up a RAID Set, you should use matching drives. Same manufacturer, same size, same model, same revision, same firmware, same batch if you can manage it. You can sett up an array with with mismatched drives, but chance of failure is then increased. If your existing drives are mismatched, you might want to consider some other setup, like JBOD which is also supported by your linked enclosure.

Some of the best advice I've seen on here

 

[martinm0]

I have been using one of the HP mediasmart servers for media streaming for a few years and it worked great for me. I've always been really hesitant of RAID configs (outside of mirroring) due to the fact that you could lose all your data across all the drives if even one has an issue. In Windows Home Server 2003 (which is what runs on the HP servers) it uses Drive Extender to create a storage pool from any hard drives you add (these can be any capacity and speed). It then gives you one giant pool as a networked drive (mine was 12TB from 8 HDDs) and from there I managed all my media.

In WHS 2011 they removed this feature. I purchased Drive Bender, and add in to WHS 2011, and it allows drive pooling as I had before.

This is really the best method to RAID/NRAID/JBOD set ups as if one drive fails, you can still pull the data off the others (and you can even just pull a drive from the server while its off and read the data from another machine).

I know this is a bit off topic from your question, but it sounds like you might be growing your storage pool in the future and thought this could be helpful. Drive Bender runs on all version of Windows as well, though I know you were looking for a headless option. Anyway, hope this helps.