Question Storage Strategy - opinions

[velocci]

Hi all, I'm thinking of buying a NAS to store my data of varying importance. What do you think of this strategy, I would buy a NAS with 5 bays for example. I would use 3 or 4 of the bays in a raid 5 configuration and when money allows I would put a large hardrive in the last bay and keep a manual backup of the data in the raid 5 volume for SW failures. The reason for the manual backup is because I have a DNS 2 bay nas that I had in raid 1 configuration and something happened to the volume and I lost a lot of files. obviously both hardrives were the same so I couldn't get the data from the other hardrive.

 

[Lutfij]

That's not a bad idea but your minimum of drives on a RAID 5 array would be 3 drives.

Also you're still vulnerable to mishaps;
RAID 5RAID 5 consists of block-level striping with distributed parity. Unlike RAID 4, parity information is distributed among the drives, requiring all drives but one to be present to operate. Upon failure of a single drive, subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that no data is lost. RAID 5 requires at least three disks.[11] Like all single-parity concepts, large RAID 5 implementations are susceptible to system failures because of trends regarding array rebuild time and the chance of drive failure during rebuild (see "Increasing rebuild time and failure probability" section, below).[22] Rebuilding an array requires reading all data from all disks, opening a chance for a second drive failure and the loss of the entire array.
from here.

 

[velocci]

i would use medium size drives such as 6 or 8TB for each of the raid5 bays. while waiting to buy a 14 or 16TB drive, I can backup the really important files on another device like a PC. most of the data would be movies which are not really important. the important files would be my pictures which currently only take up about 2TB.

what storage strategy would you use?