Raid Question failure of device

[jnkweaver]

I am looking to buy a 4 drive NAS unit for home use soon. I am considering using raid 1 or raid 10. I believe I understand the failures of drives and how to recover but what if the device itself fails? Do I then have to put the 4 drives in my pc or a new device and rebuild the raid or does it know the raid is already setup? Does the order of the drives in the box matter?

 

[USAFRet]

I have a 4 bay QNAP.

Currently, the 4 x 3TB drives are in RAID 5. Giving 8TB usable space.
I suppose if the actual box dies, you'd put the drives in a replacement QNAP box.
You can't just import these into a PC with a whole different OS and RAID controller and hope to have them readable.

 

[ss202sl]

You still need a backup of the nas. Raid is not a backup, and it is possible to have the controller fail and not be able to get the raid back up, and so then you'd need the backup.

 

[USAFRet]

You still need a backup of the nas. Raid is not a backup, and it is possible to have the controller fail and not be able to get the raid back up, and so then you'd need the backup.

Oh yes, exactly.
This NAS box data is also backed up to a USB connected 8TB Seagate.

 

[S Haran]

If your NAS device uses Linux Software RAID aka mdadm and many of them do then in theory if the NAS enclosure fails you could place the drives in a desktop computer and boot up Linux which should assemble the RAID and let you access the RAID Data Volume. Why not run a test it would be a good learning experience. When you get the new NAS load some test data on it and see if you can recover. There are also RAID recovery apps that can also do the job. But as others have stated it is best to make backups if you value the data.