I have a DS220+ with 2 identical drives, configured as RAID, so just one volume. Everything was working great, but to access the new object-recognition in photos, I added RAM, which caused some corruption and now the volume is read-only and won’t repair itself (even after removing the RAM). So now I’m preparing to do an external backup and rebuild the NAS. But now I’m wondering: If volume issues are more likely than drive issues, should I forget about RAID, create one volume on each drive, and use the second volume as a local backup? Or is RAID still the best first line of defence? (Or is there a way I can do both with two drives?


Get another hard drive and do RAID5. Then you get striping AND parity.
Or even better, get TWO more drives and do RAID10.
I’ve got 8 SAS drives in a RAID10 and it’s lovely.