How is RAID 1 in single NAS box a good idea?

[ElektroDragon]

In the past two months, I've lost two 3TB hard drives due to power issues. One had a fried PCB due a PC PSU blowing out. The other had a fried PCB due to me attaching the wrong power brick into an external drive enclosure.

So it seems to me a RAID 1 configuration where both drives are fed by the same power source, and inside the same box, is a recipe for disaster.

You are in no way protected from power circuitry problems, which will likely blow both drives at once!

Much better is to get a single drive NAS and put in one those enterprise class 24x7 drives with a huge warranty and very high MTBF, and have a backup of your data stored somewhere else entirely rather than having a single point of failure. The consumer level "built for NAS" drives seem to have crap reliability because they expect you to run a 2 drive RAID 1 box. Seems to me like a scam to sell more drives.

Buy a single drive NAS, and an enterprise class drive, save tons of money, and keep a backup somewhere else, like on your actual PC. Having the only copy of your data on a RAID 1 NAS where both drives are in the same box and share the same power supply seems extremely stupid given my recent experiences.

 

[stormy1]

As the old saying goes raid is not a backup.
And as you found out just one external drive may not be a backup either if you happen to blow it up while the server data is down also.

 

[stormy1]

Buy a single drive NAS, and an enterprise class drive, save tons of money, and keep a backup somewhere else, like on your actual PC.

plus to an offline removable drive for when a lightning strike takes out both the nas and your computer.
There is another old saying if you don't have at least 3 copies of your data then you don't really have it at all.

 

[zrav]

put in one those enterprise class 24x7 drives with a huge warranty and very high MTBF

To my knowledge there is no publicly available data indicating that enterprise SATA drives are more reliable than desktop drives. Backblazes study indicate they are similar, for instance.
Also, MTBF ratings stated by manufacturers (although produced via some method) appear to be highly inflated, with real numbers about an order of magnitude worse.

 

[Aesma]

I agree that RAID1 in a 2 drives NAS enclosure doesn't make much sense, you wouldn't expect continuity of service to matter and you still need a backup.

 

[mwroobel]

As with anything in life (and not just computers) a single point of failure is something to be mitigated if at all possible. In this case, the mirror is an uptime adjunct in case of a failure it will keep the data available without going to a backup. You should always have airgapped backups, preferably at least one generation offsite for best practice.

 

[SirMaster]

The point of RAID 1 in a single enclosure is the same point for any RAID.

Uptime, and the ability to continue using the datastore during a HDD failure which will happen eventually.

You still need a backup, but a backup is a different thing and a backup usually does not provide uptime like RAID does unless you have a failover system in place which is far more complicated.

 

[Butcher9_9]

To make everything even more complicated you should store a backup off site. If you house burns down no matter how many backups you have inside the house they are all gone.

 

[Deleted member 126051]

plus to an offline removable drive for when a lightning strike takes out both the nas and your computer.
There is another old saying if you don't have at least 3 copies of your data then you don't really have it at all.

They actually say that about data restores as well.

If you haven't tried (and succeeded) at restoring your data, you don't have a backup.

 

[SirMaster]

To make everything even more complicated you should store a backup off site. If you house burns down no matter how many backups you have inside the house they are all gone.

Unless you keep them in a waterproof/fireproof safe in the basement, bolted to the floor I'd say they are relatively safe.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

Generally what you want is RAID1 for your desktop rather than the NAS. Redundancy is more important on the workstation in case you lose a drive in-between backups.

'Enterprise' drives seem like a waste of money, you usually end up paying almost 2x as much for a drive that may or may not actually be more reliable than a regular consumer drive.

 

[Butcher9_9]

'Enterprise' drives seem like a waste of money, you usually end up paying almost 2x as much for a drive that may or may not actually be more reliable than a regular consumer drive.

Better to have 2 backups with consumer drives than 1 with enterprise. Look at companies like Blaze, they just use backups and redundancy to cover the higher failure rates.

Also getting back onto the NAS topic, would you rather use Raid0 ? However likely you are to loss data when using Raid1 you are way more likely to lose it using Raid0 (you could use Jbod I guess)