DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Hello,

First time poster, just received my DNS323

I've been trying to read as much as possible from here and understanding good backup procedures. I believe my computer HDDs are past their service life and so this seemed like a good solution till I can afford a crazy hardware raid solution

I understand the difference between backup vs disk redundancy and availability.. and I was originally going to have 2 disks in a RAID mirror configuration, so that each disk had the data at any given time (other than when syncing..). since, and amongst other things, though now I'm wondering if for my needs would be a set up with "2 individual disks" and an rsync job running to effectively mirror them.

My reasons for this, which may be incorrect, are that there are some possible complications with RAID1 set ups in the DNS323 that can result in a loss of data in event of a single disk failure. I also understand, possibly incorrectly, that mirroring them manually does not have any specific complications yet achieves the same level of disk redundancy. Are these assumptions correct?

In the case of a single disk failure would it be easier to recover with an individual surviving disk or RAID1 surviving disk?

OTOH - I do have a gigabit network so I would like the read performance of RAID1 over 2 individual disks.. and the intention was to have a redundant backup.. so that's +1 for RAID1. Availability is less of a concern as it will be a backup.. also I don't think the DNS323 would be much faster reading to justify the complications... I do not require snapshots or restore to a particular time.. I've never had that and haven't needed it in a way the DNS323 could address.. just trying to ward off hardware failure related data loss.. arrrghh competing assumptions everywhere!

For the record I'll be putting in a WD1000EACS 1tb green power drive into it on Monday. In 2 weeks I'll be getting a second one of these drives from a different batch. Also I should mention that the power does cut out here sometimes.. I do not yet have an UPS and so the set up would need to take that into account and I'm unsure if the RAID1 would not cope with this? At work we have batteries for our RAID controllers...




Sorry for the long post - but on spending many many hours reading this great forum I wanted to check for understanding before proceeding - perhaps someone can say "no RAID1 will be easier and is safer in this case" or someone will say "individual disks are better because you don't have both disks yet and has no disadvantages over RAID1 in this case" etc..

Thanks for your time - you can see why I posted this is because with all that I've read, I'm still a bit conflicted and I'm hoping someone can mention something I haven't thought of...

Last edited by someonestolecc (2008-11-07 18:29:15)