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I have 4 x 4TB WD Blue drives, what Raid to use?
For my home-server that occasionally runs I am busy expanding it. I only had 2 drives, of different size, a 4TB WD Blue and a 3TB WD Red. Now I want to remove the WD Red, and I have bought 3 x 4TB WD Blue drives. These drives perform pretty well in a normal home situation. This home server will definitely not be running 24/7 but I will turn it on now and then to add more movies, tv-shows, update my backup, just my data-rig, sort of. But I am scratching my head about what kind of RAID I would like to use. I have 4 drives of 4TB. Raid 0 is nice and fast, but no fault tolerance. Raid 1 is loosing half of your diskspace. Raid 6 the same. Raid 5 seems the most logical choice. But what to choose, the raid controller on the motherboard? Or do it through Windows 10? And also I cannot really find that much about recover a raid 5 array after 1 drive has failed. JBOD is also an option, but I determined, this is also a form of an 'array' and if one drive fails, then this array fails also, and I don't see any method of retrieving the remaining data, nor do you know which data remains. So JBOD, no. Raid 5 seems to most logical choice, even though I loose 4TB of diskspace because of parity. But, is it okay to do it with WD Blue's, even in a situation I don't use the home (backup) server that much?
Edit: @User: The problem is that if you have 4 drives of each 4TB what options do you furthermore have? Sure I can also keep them completely separated, but then there is no safety. Raid 6 is simply taking too much data. JBOD is nearly the same as 4 loose drives or raid 0, because if the array fails, how to get it back? What remains? Raid 5 does seem the only logical choice. And I am not a heavy user or have a big family using this data home server.
2 Answers
- ∅Lv 73 months ago
Blue drives are a bad idea for a server. Blue is for occasional use. they wear out quick, and are slower, even RAIDed.
Reds are designed for server use. they are faster and more durable, which is why they cost more.
Blacks would even be better than Blues.
honestly, i don't like WD for drives at all. they are cheap and crappy, even if they are ubiquitous. HGST FTW! Seagate is good also.
- Anonymous4 months ago
JBOD is NOT an array. It's exactly what you had before. It's "just a bunch of disks". No parity, no redundancy. If one disk dies, you still have everything on your other drives.* This is entirely an issue of you not being able to decide whether capacity or data integrity is more important to you. We can't decide that for you. All options are going to compromise one of those in some way. Personally, I don't consider movies and TV shows to be necessary for backups, as they can be easily re-downloaded or re-ripped from DVD/Blu-Ray. If you weren't worried enough about them to implement cloud backup or RAID 1 before, it makes no sense to worry about them now.
Source(s): * The Wikipedia section on JBOD and data failure is about spanned volumes, not JBOD in general. It's also not entirely true, depending on the software used. btrfs on Linux, for example, can mirror the metadata for files across disks, but span the actual data.
