Synology Hybrid RAID - What's the point in a 2-disk system?

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redsrule2500

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I recently purchased a Synology DS212j and installed 2x 3TB WD Red Drives.

Upon formatting the disks, it asked me to choose a method of initiation for the drives, and I went with the defaul "Synology Hybrid RAID". I have now looked into this a little more and it appears that the "Synology Hybrid RAID" isn't a replacement for a true backup, which makes sense for a RAID.

However, I only have 3 TB of free space - so what the heck is the point? Why wouldn't I just have 1 drive do all the storage and the second drive continously backup the first drive?

Thanks. I can't seem to understand the point of this Hybrid RAID in a 2-disk system....
 
RAID is not backup, you got that right. Now, if one drive in your NAS has a hardware failure, it will continue to run, and your data will still be there. It's not a backup because if something else goes wrong (power supply of the NAS burning everything, NAS controller going haywire, flooding or fire in your house, virus attacking your data, etc.), then you've lost everything.
 
I have a Synology DS2413+ with 12x3TB WD Red drives which I have setup in SHR2, the point is greater protection, however it really depends on the number of drives you have and what your risk factor versus drive space is. In my case, I would have to suffer three drive failures to totally lose my data, not a likely scenario. If you have four drives and you want to maximize disk space and not risk, then go with RAID 5 or SHR 1, you can suffer 1 drive failure but not two. The other thing to remember is SHR does more then just redundancy, you can mix drive sizes with SHR and still create a RAID volume. IMO I don't think it makes sense to use SHR 2 until you have six or even eight drives and are willing of course to give up two drives for redundancy.
 
ashman said:
I have a Synology DS2413+ with 12x3TB WD Red drives which I have setup in SHR2, the point is greater protection, however it really depends on the number of drives you have and what your risk factor versus drive space is. In my case, I would have to suffer three drive failures to totally lose my data, not a likely scenario. If you have four drives and you want to maximize disk space and not risk, then go with RAID 5 or SHR 1, you can suffer 1 drive failure but not two. The other thing to remember is SHR does more then just redundancy, you can mix drive sizes with SHR and still create a RAID volume. IMO I don't think it makes sense to use SHR 2 until you have six or even eight drives and are willing of course to give up two drives for redundancy.
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Well, first off, extremely jealous of your insane (awesom) storage solution. What the heck do you store on that thing!?

Secondly, yes, but my NAS is a maximium of TWO drives. It seems to me that it would be better to setup a nightly backup of Drive A onto Drive B, rather than using the Synology Hybrid RAID. This way I'm not messing with any RAID tech, and have the ability to recover up to 24 hours of accidently deleted files from Drive A.
 
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I store about 10 TB of movies and another 5ish TB of TV shows, and its constantly growing.

Yes in your case, with only two drives, SHR will do nothing for you, netter to stick with RAID 1.
 
SHR is simply an abstracted layer above the software Linux MD RAID. It uses a mixture of RAID 1 and RAID 5/6. So thus with 2 disks it will only ever choose RAID 1 when automatically configuring your array.
 
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