I am building a NAS in RAID 1 (Mirror) mode. Should I buy 2 of the same drive from the same manufacturer? or does it not matter so much?

  • jelloeater@lemmy.worldEnglish
    141·
    2 years ago

    You can use different manufacturers, just make sure they are the SAME size and speed. You can also get the same ones from the same vendor, just from different online shops to try and offset getting a bad batch.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    You absolutely can. Of course you’ll only be able to use as much capacity as the smallest disk. Sometime ago I was running a secondary mirror with one 8TB disk and 3 disks pretending to be the other 8TB disk. They were 4TB, 3TB and a 1TB - trivial with LVM. Worked without a hitch for a few years till I replaced the three gnomes in a trench coat with another 8TB disk. Obviously that’s suboptimal but it works fine under certain loads.

  • wazzupdog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 years ago

    If you haven’t looked into it, and if you already have the disks of varying capacity, check out JBOD. You will have to configure a system for backups however as you wont have parity like raid1

      • wazzupdog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        I’m aware, but raid 1 is mirroring which is redundancy, a jbod offers no redundancy so a backup would be even more crucial to protecting from data loss. Also i never said raid is a backup.

        • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          2 years ago

          ^this. but I’ll go even further, do you @mypasswordis1234@lemmy.world really need RAID? How much date are you planning to write every day?

          In some case, like a typical home users with a few writes per day or even week simply having a second disk that is updated every day with rsync may be a better choice. Consider that if you’re two mechanical disks spinning 24h7 they’ll most likely fail at the same time (or during a RAID rebuild) and you’ll end up loosing all your data. Simply having one active disk (shared on the network and spinning) and the other spun down and only turned on once a day with a cron rsync job mean your second disk will last a LOT longer and you’ll be safer.

          • AtariDump@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            2 years ago

            Right up until that job to turn the other drive and run the backup stops and then you don’t realize it until 17 months later.

            Either way, RAID ain’t a backup, but it makes losing a drive easier.

            • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
              11·
              2 years ago

              If you don’t setup and monitor things properly everything fails and keep going in an unpredictable state - even a software RAID.

  • SheeEttin@lemmy.worldBannedEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    I usually find the cheapest drives and buy multiple of those, but you should be able to assemble a RAID out of different disks, though you’ll be limited to the space of the smallest one in the mirror set.

    Also make sure that your RAID systems supports this.