Which RAID Type Should You Use on your Synology NAS?

picking the correct raid type is arguably the most important thing you can do when setting up a new Nest but the correct raid type will be different for everybody based on whatever your requirements are so in this video we're going to take a look at what each raid type is how it works so you can decide exactly which option you should use based on your individual requirements now I want to jump right into this but before we get to that raid is not a backup so realistically it shouldn't matter what raid type you select because you will have a full set of backups that you can always restore from if you ever had to so now that that's out of the way let's jump right into it and the first thing that we're going to take a look at is raid one now raid one simply is a mirrored pair what that means is if you have two hard drives the data will be the exact same on each hard drive this is good from a read performance perspective because the data can be read from either hard drive will not impact right speeds but read will be slightly faster now you can have more than two drives for raid one but two drives is honestly in my opinion the easiest to understand but the reality is you can lose either of those drives without losing any of your data That's The Power of it it is a mirrored pair now raid five is interesting because you have to use at least three discs and it has single parody so what that means is that blocks of the data are written to all of the Diss and one block is written as parody so if you lose any of the discs you will not lose any of your data so let's say you have five hard drives you can lose any of those five hard drives and you will not lose any of your data if you lose two hard drives you will lose the entire storage pool that's what you're trying to avoid now raid five has good read performance and it's slightly slower write performance because of writing parody but the performance we're going to talk about a little later because it might or might not be something you should take into consideration so jumping into raid six we have four minimum discs that you have to use and it's double parody so what that means is you can lose two hard drives if you have using the example we used before if you have five total hard drives and you lose two of them you will not lose any of your data you have to lose at least three of them to lose the entire storage pool now from a performance perspective raid 6 has good read performance but it's slower right performance especially slower than raid five because you're using double parody now raid zero I'm going to be very quick with this because there's no redundancy at all basically it just makes all of the hard drives that you have into one big storage pool and if you lose any of those hard drives you will lose the entire storage pool so there is no redundancy but from a performance perspective it's great because you're basically merging all of those hard drives into one big hard drive that's kind of the easiest way to think about it RAID 10 Ray 10 is interesting because you need to use at least four minimum minum drives and what it does is RAID 10 is a striped mirrored pair so it's basically raid one plus raid zero so what you have is you kind of have the best of both worlds you have great read and write speeds due to the raid zero but your data is mirrored because it has mirrored pairs now this is where it gets interesting because Ray 10 is viewed a lot of the times as the best from a redundancy perspective and in very specific cases it might be but raid six is actually a little better and the reason is because if you lose any two drives in the same mirrored pair you lose the entire storage pool so I want to repeat that RAID 10 is raid 1 plus Zer so you have striped mirrored pairs if you lose two hard drives in one of those mirrored pairs so those specific two hard drives you will lose the entire storage pool now compare that to raid six and if you lose two hard drives you still have to lose a third in order to lose the entire storage pool so from that perspective rate six is actually better from a redundancy perspective than rate 10 where it gets complicated is technically let's say you're using eight total hard drives you'll have four mirrored pairs if you lose one hard drive from each of those mirrored pairs you won't lose any of your data so technically you can lose up to a maximum of half the total drives with RAID 10 but it has to be specific hard drives obviously you don't pick you know what what hard drive is going to fail so that's where it gets to be you know kind of messy because the reality is that you could potentially lose more than two drives which is the only thing that rate six protects against but if you lose the right two drives then you lose everything so from a from a performance perspective Ray 10 is great because it is once again a stried miror pair so the only other things I want to talk about is if you're using Sony devices sonology has shr and shr2 now shr basically will just allow you to go in and use mixed siiz drives so if you have two 8 terabyte hard drives and you have two four terabyte hard drives as an example what you'll see is that with raid five you will have usable storage space space of 10.9 terab but you'll have 7.3 terab that is unused space you can't use it at all just sits there with shr it basically the way that it writes the data to the actual hard drives it allows you to utilize some of that additional storage space so with shr you will have 14.5 terabytes available which is I don't know a little more than three terabytes uh compared to raid five and you'll have 7.3 total terab saved for protection so you're utilizing hard drive space that with raid five you wouldn't be able to use now shr2 and raid six are basically the same where you can have two drives of redundancy um but it will do the same it will allow you to utilize storage space that raid six would not allow you to utilize so shr one drive you can lose shr2 two drives you can lose and shr can be compared to rate Five shr R 2 can be compared to raid six though you might have additional storage space with shr just keep in mind that shr is theology hybrid raid and you're basically allowing yourself flexibility if you're going to use the same size hard drives in my opinion you should just utilize raid but if you're not sure what size hard drives you want to use in my opinion shr is a great option let's take a look at a few important notes so the first is that if you select raid five or shr you can convert your storage pool at a later date to raid six if you're using rate five or shr2 if you're using shr now that rebuild process is going to take a while it's going to take a long time but the point is that you can do it so if you select raid six right off the bat you can't go back to raid five if you select shr2 right off the bat you cannot go back to shr that is an important thing to mention next we talked about performance now performance is always important faster read write speeds will be better than slower read write speeds I would say that it's something you should take into consideration but it shouldn't be the only deciding factor generally if you have a storage pool that has to be extremely performant you'll know it up front and that's what we're going to talk about in a minute here that your requirements are ultimately going to determine which option you should use so should you take performance into account yes you should should it be the only thing you take into consideration no especially if you're not willing to look at exactly what you're going to be doing on it and potential Network performance that you have there's a lot of factors you have to take into consideration the final thing I want to point out is rebuild time so when you lose a hard drive what you're going to have to do if it fails for whatever reason what you're going to have to do is replace it and when you replace it whatever raid type you're using will slowly rebuild that hard drive some are better than others so if you're using raid one the rebuild will be fast if you're using RAID 10 the rebuild will be fast if you're you're using rate Five the rebuild will be slower if you're using rate six the rebuild will be the slowest it also stresses the other drives so if you're using raid six for example and you lose one hard drive you're stressing the other hard drives that you have now you have an extra drive for redundancy so in a worst case scenario if in that rebuild process you lose one of those hard drives it's okay because you still have redundancy with raid five you will not have it so should you take rebuild times into consideration yes you should take them into consideration but once again they should not be the only deciding factor that you have if you have a good set of backups because raid is not a backup generally you're protected and you can pick whichever option you think makes the most sense so now that we got that out of the way I want to point out a few General suggestions and the reality is you should determine what option makes the most sense for you but generally we're just going to talk really quickly about some options that you can use so I want to talk quickly about SSD cache I have an article on SSD cache that I will leave in the description of the video um but if you're using read write cache you have to use Raid one sonology will not allow you to use Raid zero but if you have a readon cache It generally makes sense to use Raid zero because you're not actually writing anything to the hard drive you're just trying to get the fastest overall performance so you want those those two nvme SSD drives to work together to provide the fastest overall performance so read only cash raate zero read write cach raid one now from a Nas hard drive perspective if you have a 2bay Nas you should use Raid one because shr isn't going to provide any additional flexibility and if you were to have one of the higher-end 2bay nas devices and you bought an expansion unit in the future that cable that you're going to have to use is a point of failure so you're not going to have the same storage pool or you shouldn't have the same storage pool so from that perspective use Raid one 4bay Nas generally I think is the sweet spot for raid five because you can utilize one drive for redundancy and then you'll have the storage space of three total drives so if you have four 10 tbyte drives you'll have 30 terabyt of usable space and 10 terabytes save for redundancy now if you really really care about having the highest level of redundancy you can look look at raid six it might be a little overkill for a 4bay Nas but it is an option especially if you're not going to be storing that much data on it and you just want the additional protection shout out here as well for shr and shr2 when I say raid five or Raid six you can realistically use either option it will just depend on how flexible you want your storage pool to be so a five bay Nas is where it it's really personal preference you're probably going to use Raid five or Raid six um generally this is the The Tipping Point where I would say that you can use Raid five for a five bay Nas but for anything more than that you're probably not going to use Raid five So based on your requirements rate Five rate six shr or shr2 four five bay Nas devices probably makes the most sense so six Bay and up anything more than six Bays you would generally use Raid six shr2 or RAID 10 based on your requirements and the final thing I want to talk about is RAID 10 I saved it for last for a reason if you're you're doing something very specific and you need the increased performance rate 10 is a great option but it's not going to be the best for all situations so for example if you have a 4bay Nas and you're utilizing RAID 10 just remember that if you lose the right two hard drives you're going to lose your whole storage pool with raid six you won't so if redundancy is important raid six is going to be the better option in that case but if you're in a scenario where you know you need the best overall performance and I'm saying this because you most likely will know or you're not watching this video cuz you already know you're you're going to use Ray 10 but Ray 10 is one of those interesting ones where if you have a 4B device you technically can use it though I'd probably suggest you don't six Bay device and up you can if you have a six Bay 8 bay or higher you can starts to make a little bit more sense in those uh scenarios it's also very common in Enterprise environments to use Raid 10 but the overall truth here is that your requirements meaning the amount of redundancy you want the data that's going to be be stored on the nas how sensitive it is how important it is how you know fast you would potentially need to rebuild a degraded storage pool those requirements will determine which RAID option you should use for the bulk of people you're probably going to be fine with raid one raid five or shr because I want to say the most popular Nas devices are 2bay and 4bay Nas devices and then as you go up they get a little less popular um so the majority of people are probably going to use Raid one raid five or shr as soon as you get to that six Bay nassin up that's where you kind of have to really sit there and think about what option makes the most sense the only thing I can tell you is you probably should never use raate zero unless you know for a fact you're using it for a very specific reason so I'm hopeful that this video helped you guys out if it did please give it a thumbs up if you like this type of content please consider subscribing to the channel thanks guys

Channel: WunderTech

Views: 3,055

Keywords: synology raid types, synology nas raid, synology raid type

Id: LJo0jWk3xhU

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024