Took advantage of a recent sale and got myself 6x 4TB portable drives. I checked, it can come apart and it's plain SATA drives with USB adapter. Now I would like to make a quick NAS box with RAID 5 and I was wondering what is better: ITX or something very small with USB 3.0 hub and keep all on USB and change setting so it's not removable drive. Or buy a motherboard with at least 6 SATA ports?
What is better for DIY NAS: bunch of USB 3.0 drives or bunch of SATA drives?
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My gut preference would be to use straight SATA and avoid overhead from the USB->SATA.... aesthetically, that will also save you having half a dozen external power adapters plugged in for all those drives.
I might strongly recommend against RAID-5, however, in favor of RAID 1+0. Given the size of the drives, RAID-5 is somewhat outdated and doesn't greatly increase the chances of successful recovery.
I might strongly recommend against RAID-5, however, in favor of RAID 1+0. Given the size of the drives, RAID-5 is somewhat outdated and doesn't greatly increase the chances of successful recovery.
2.5" hard drives don't need extra power so there would only be one power adapter for the USB hub but yeah straight SATA is probably better.
I have 6x 4TB. In RAID 5, I would have 20TB plus 4TB for parity. With 0+1 I'd only have 12TB. It'd probably help if I mentioned what I'd be using NAS for. It'd be mostly for downloaded video and digital copies (all legal) so I could watch em anywhere. It will not be used as backup for important stuff, those are done separately to 2 different portable drives.
There is another RAID similar to RAID 5 that uses 2 drives for recovery: RAID 6 but not many cheap motherboard supports this. There's also RAID-Z which is a variation of RAID 5 with improved performance and less chance of error due to crash during parity computation.
A lot of specialized variations aren't found on motherboard unfortunately, it's mostly software RAID.
One thing for sure, I can't suggest straight up RAID 0 at all, if one drive goes down the whole array loses data and no chance of recovery.
I have 6x 4TB. In RAID 5, I would have 20TB plus 4TB for parity. With 0+1 I'd only have 12TB. It'd probably help if I mentioned what I'd be using NAS for. It'd be mostly for downloaded video and digital copies (all legal) so I could watch em anywhere. It will not be used as backup for important stuff, those are done separately to 2 different portable drives.
There is another RAID similar to RAID 5 that uses 2 drives for recovery: RAID 6 but not many cheap motherboard supports this. There's also RAID-Z which is a variation of RAID 5 with improved performance and less chance of error due to crash during parity computation.
A lot of specialized variations aren't found on motherboard unfortunately, it's mostly software RAID.
One thing for sure, I can't suggest straight up RAID 0 at all, if one drive goes down the whole array loses data and no chance of recovery.
USB, even USB3, will give you much worse performance, because the interface has all sorts of overhead. Direct SATA is far superior.
BTW, Raid-6 might be something to look into. Gives you dual redundancy. Rebuilding an array of 4TB drives takes a LONG time (about a day), so the risk of a second failure is very real.
BTRFS or RAiD-Z are other options, but maybe a bit more complicated to setup. Does give checksum assurance, though.
BTW, Raid-6 might be something to look into. Gives you dual redundancy. Rebuilding an array of 4TB drives takes a LONG time (about a day), so the risk of a second failure is very real.
BTRFS or RAiD-Z are other options, but maybe a bit more complicated to setup. Does give checksum assurance, though.
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