Vizioen
September 15, 2014, 11:06am
9
It depends on what way you want to use it. My nas has 4 bays, 2 drives and at the minute they’re just individual disks being used as dumb network storage. If I wanted I could set up a striped raid for one big fast volume or a mirrored setup for security. A lot of places will use a raid 5 which means that you have the majority of your drives striped into one big fast setup, and a single “parity” disk which adds in error checking and security. Say you’ve got drives in a stripe for speed and one for redundancy, what the redundancy / parity disk will do is see what zeros and ones are saved on the same section on each stripe disk, add up the total and then record that total on your parity disk. So say you’ve three disks and one safety disk and you’ve got 0 on one disk, 1 on the second and 1 on the third, the parity disk will store 2 as you 0 + 1 + 1 = 2. So if one of the disks goes down, all the software has to do is check what the total was on your parity disk and then see what amount was missing to make the total. It’ll be able to rebuild the missing disk this way - you’re fucked if more than one drive goes though. If you’ve got stuff that’s mission critical then you might be safer with a total mirror of your drives rather than just a single parity disk. The cloud backup option is damn cheap too - I use crash plan as it’s only about 5 dollars a month so why not.
Oh boy, that just sounded like Chinese to me haha. I will have to re-read this 10 times first. Thank you
edit: alright I get it now. What I understand is that RAID 5 allows you to have a backup if one of the drives fail but without the need for just as much drives. That leaves me with more questions now then I had
haha