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?
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?
It probably doesn’t matter in most cases, especially software RAID. I’ve had proprietary storage system vendors recommending being very careful about identical disks but that could just be salesman crap.
^this. but I’ll go even further, do you @[email protected] 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.
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.
If you don’t setup and monitor things properly everything fails and keep going in an unpredictable state - even a software RAID.