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?

  • vegivamp@feddit.nlEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    Quite the opposite. Use drives from as many different manufacturers as you can, especially when buying them at the same time. You want to avoid similar lifecycles and similar potential fabrication defects as much as possible, because those things increase the likelihood that they will fall close to each other - particularly with the stress of rebuilding the first one that failed.

    • duncesplayed@lemmy.oneEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      To the best of my knowledge, this “drives from the same batch fail at around the same time” folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm.

      • Hopfgeist@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm

        It may, performance-wise, but usually not enough to matter for a small self-hosting servers.

      • Overspark@feddit.nlEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        If everything went fine during production you’re probably right. But there have definitely been batches of hard disks with production flaws which caused all drives from that batch to fail in a similar way.

    • empireOfLove@lemmy.oneEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      If I had a dollar for every time rebuilding a RAID array after one failed drive caused a second drive failure in the array in less than 24 hours… I’d probably buy groceries for a week.

        • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          7 months ago

          I’ve heard just in general. The resilvering process is hard on all the remaining drives for an extended period of time.

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
            English
            0·
            7 months ago

            So you’re saying I should be running RAIDz2 instead of RAIDz1? You’re probably right. 😂

            • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              7 months ago

              I made that switch a few years ago for that reason.

              That said, as the saying goes, RAID is not a backup, it should never be the thing that stands between you having and losing all your data. RAID is effectively just one really dependable hard drive, but it’s still a single point of failure.

              • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
                English
                0·
                7 months ago

                So you’re saying I should be running JBOD with backups instead of RAIDz1? You’re probably right. 🤭

                • teawrecks@sopuli.xyzEnglish
                  1·
                  7 months ago

                  As long as you’re ok with it being way less dependable, and having to rebuild it from scratch more often 😉.

  • wazzupdog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months 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
        2·
        7 months 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.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          Can’t you just format jbod with zfs or some other raid solution? I’m sure it depends on hardware but it shouldn’t be rocket science

  • Kaldo@kbin.social
    1·
    7 months ago

    I always thought you’re supposed to buy similar drives so the performance is better for some reason (I guess the same logic as when picking RAM?) but this thread is changing my mind, I guess it doesn’t matter after all👀

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    English
    1·
    7 months 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.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    SSD Solid State Drive mass storage

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

    [Thread #328 for this sub, first seen 2nd Dec 2023, 20:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]