Which RAID Type Should You Use on your Synology NAS?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Two things I want to clarify: 1. SHR only needs two drives. If you plan on using a 4+ bay NAS and only want to start with two drives, you can use SHR if you'd like, but you cannot convert SHR to RAID 5 at a later date. 2. You can upgrade RAID 1 to RAID 5 if you'd like as well. Here are all of the possible conversion types: kb.synology.com/en-br/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/storage_pool_change_raid_type?version=7 Thanks for watching!

[@blcjck8121]

AFAIK you can start an SHR array with only one disk. Also fun fact, RAID0 is not really RAID 😁

[@Ronjr73]

I didn't see the link in the description about how to do back ups. Where can I find out about that at?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

@@Ronjr73 I'm sorry about that - here you go! www.wundertech.net/synology-hyper-backup/

[@Ronjr73]

@@WunderTechTutorials thank you so much really appreciate it

[@TechMeOut5]

OMG that was one of the best RAID related video i have ever seen! there are several of them out there but your is by far the best! you explained everything so clearly...i think you have closed a gap for soooooo many people! excellent job Frank!

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks, Avi! Appreciate you watching!

[@jamesbennettackland]

Best explanation of the different types of RAID I've ever seen. Love it and I'll be saving this to share with people that don't understand RAID. Thank you!

[@old-patriot4509]

RAID is not a backup, however, NAS devices which create snapshots give you the same functionality that backups would provide. If you have a NAS that can do snapshots (i.e. QNAP) use them! I'm not saying "don't do backups" here. I am just highlighting some extra functionality that some NAS devices can provide. I have used snapshots to restore data in the past, and they are a very handy safety net, and more than likely FAR more up-to-date that your latest backups. My current setup takes hourly snapshots, so as long as I don't have a catastrophic failure of my RAID 10 setup, I can never loose more than an hour's worth of work. With nightly backups, I could lose an entire day's work.

[@sohammanna7929]

Would you mind sharing what NAS device you use? And do you have any printer or scanner conected to it?

[@Trackdaygenius]

Awesome video, thanks. I was about to ask about a 5 bay NAS drive, just seen the chapter…

[@raultrevino3449]

Hello, i got ds423+ 4 bay nas with 3x8tb. The main usage would be for storing photos and videos. What raid do you think would be the best for my case. Thanks Ps. Really liked your video. You just got another sub 👍

[@sohammanna7929]

RAID 5 should be the sweet spot for you. You want to store photos and videos and have 3 disks (the minimum for RAID 5). You can use 16TB space and god forbid, if you were to lose one drive, you'd basically lose nothing. And if you don't mind, can you tell me if you have connected any printer or scanner to it?

[@ibrahimdeniz7308]

i got a synology as a gift and think its cool as my phones storage always fills up too fast and i like the idea of having my own cloud. but whats up with redundency? okay i get raid 1, but why would you need more than one redundant drive? as if two would fail, what are the odds?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Sadly, higher than you'd think, but it's up to your individual tolerance and backups.

[@ryanw8664]

Thank you! Total newbie here and I’m finding your videos extremely helpful for getting started. One question - if I use SHR or SHR-2, am I permanently locked into Synology hardware going forward?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Yes, unfortunately. They're great options though due to the flexibility, but it's up to you!

[@ryanw8664]

Yeah, I don’t think I can resist the benefits! I’m surprised there isn’t some way to rebuild it as a standard RAID type later though.

[@StaceySchroederCanada]

Okay I really need to learn how to block ads.... I think it's level 2? ........... Can you please make a video with your ideas? ...... Your content is the best right now. You're hitting things I need to know about.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

You should be able to install Pi-hole on the NAS if you want: www.wundertech.net/how-to-setup-pi-hole-on-a-synology-nas-two-methods/

[@StaceySchroederCanada]

@@WunderTechTutorials Thank you. One issue... After getting everything to work by pointing my router dns to the synology ip ..... failed to retrieve external IP address. if i reverse the process everything is normal. ... ??

[@WunderTechTutorials]

@@StaceySchroederCanada What exactly do you mean by external IP?

[@StaceySchroederCanada]

@@WunderTechTutorials that's the message I got on the NAS ..... I'm learning the hard way.... the NAS can't retrieve info from outside, can't populate package centre, can't get new metadata, can't remote into the NAs etc. I have Asus Router.

[@RogierYou]

And you can leave one drive unused and select it to be automatically replace a failed drive. So you can set it with dual drive redundancy + automatic replacer one of the failed drives. This leaves you a lot of time to return tot the unit and replace the failed drive(s).

[@Austinsairplanes]

Definitely consider your network speed, I got my 5x2TB raid 5 that I set up in storage spaces up to 200-300 MB/s to and from an SSD on the same machine, but I when transferred over my network I was only getting a max of 112 MB/s which is the network speed limit at 1Gb/s. I would have to get new network cards and switch capable of 2.5 Gb/s to get faster speeds. If your transferring over Wi-Fi you can forget about performance entirely.

[@tariqalbedwawi8613]

For transcoding and streaming Plex and, for quality prospective which raid is better ?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Shouldn't really be a difference between any of them.

[@myhometvaccount9365]

hi thnaks for really good vid, quick question, what does it mean... "lose the *right* drives in a raid 10 for total loss" please, whih drives in the array are the *right* (aka *wrong*) ones to fail at the same time?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Any of those same colored hard drives in the RAID 10 section.

[@Ronjr73]

Thank you for another great video. I just found your channel and am learning a lot.

[@kernzilla]

This is a great video, thanks for digging into the details 👌 Theoretical question on 8bay setup: would RAID6 technically see higher potential r/w speeds than RAID 10? seems like your fastest potential with raid 10 would be no more than 4x the rated speeds of drives, and the raid6 would give you up to 6x the amount of rated speeds (assuming no other bottlenecks). Thanks!

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks! Since RAID 10 is RAID 1+0, the striped mirrored pair of RAID 10 will provide better performance than RAID 6.

[@kernzilla]

@@WunderTechTutorials ah interesting. asking bc I see some pretty legit RAID6 speeds on my 8bay DAS, 1100-1200mb r/w, but have been thinking thru a new system and considering RAID10 for next array. it makes sense in theory the RAID10 would be faster, but worry i'll see limitations of the 4x drives working, perhaps capping in the 800-900mb total range. appreciate the input, no doubt there is a lot to consider when putting raids together!

[@shanker302]

So if a 4 bay and 8 bay and is not a back up than what should you use for a back up?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

It's not necessarily the bays, it's RAID itself. RAID is not a backup.

[@stephentsang9194]

really nicely presented. thanks just wondering how the read/write speed affects the quietness of the drive? seems like the fastest read/write = the quietest. any ideas please?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks! I sadly have no idea. I've never measured the sound as mine sits in a closet and don't really know what the difference would be, if there would even be one at all.

[@Pendragon667]

Hi, really helpful video, thank you! I still have a (dumb) question for i'm rather new to this whole thing. I have (or will have) 4 HDDs and want to group two of them with one (each) being a backup. Would i use Raid 10 in this case? For example (A + Aa) and (B + Bb)

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks! If you want two drives reserved for redundancy, RAID 6 is actually better than RAID 10 because with RAID 6, you can lose any two drives (A, Aa, B, Bb) and would have to lose a third to lose any data. With RAID 10, if you lose one mirrored pair (A, Aa or B, Bb), you'll lose all of the data on the NAS.

[@xerotrace2251]

For a 6 bay, could raid5 + hot spare be a good option? It would reduce strain on drives during a rebuild process if one fails

[@WunderTechTutorials]

I would personally just stick with RAID 6 in that scenario. The hot spare won't be used until it's needed so you'd lose one drive and have no redundancy until it rebuilds. At least with RAID 6 (and the same usable storage), you'd have two drives of redundancy.

[@robin-comments]

When using 3 discs in RAID 5, the chance a drive fails is less than 4 Discs in RAID 6 not? You would still prefer 4 discs in raid 6 over 3 in RAID 5? @@WunderTechTutorials

[@WunderTechTutorials]

@@robin-comments It's just a percentage thing. If 2 drives die in a RAID 6 array, you won't lose any of your data. If 2 drives fail in a RAID 5 array (whether it's 3 drives or 4 drives), you'll lose the data.

[@oceanbreeze76]

Hi. Thanks for your support all these years. Great job. Quick question : I have a 2bay 4tb storage ds220+ in jbod (2tb+2tb). So no redundancy. I have 3-2-1 backup strategy. I know if something goes wrong i lose everything in terms of uptime. I must replace the damaged hdd and then restore everything from backup. This will take about 1 day. I don't have a problem to wait and i can live without my data for a day or two. Am I doing wrong for choosing JBOD? thank you in advance

[@WunderTechTutorials]

I wouldn't say you're doing anything wrong as ultimately, it's personal preference. The only other option if you need 4TB would be to buy two 4TB drives and use them in RAID 1, but that's an expense that may or may not be worth it. Ultimately, if you have backups and are okay waiting for the drive to copy the data, it's fine (again, totally up to you). RAID isn't a backup anyway so if you have backups, generally, that's the important part.

[@oceanbreeze76]

@@WunderTechTutorials thanks for your reply. Really appreciated. Rgds.

[@sylvainalain6637]

Hi Frank , can you explain in details why you said that RAID5 is better in your opinion when you use the same size/model hardrive ? Right now I have my ds923+ with 2x 12TB ironwolf. I may get in the future and another ironwolf 12TB. Should I use instead raid1 instead of shr and migrate to raid 5 ? Finally , do you know how it works internally shr, if so can you do a video about that ? I don’t have a clue but , I guess instead of having one big partition per drive , shr slice each drive so that it can maximize the storage usage . It’s way too technical for me as a beginner :) With RAID , can you mismatch HDD model of the same size ? It’s one of the reason why I selected shr Thanks !!!

[@WunderTechTutorials]

I wouldn't rush to change it and when I said "I would just use RAID 5", it's really just from a simplicity standpoint. SHR adds a little complexity and I've heard of users having trouble recovering an SHR array, but I have NOT experienced that before and it's not something I'd worry too much about. Since SHR provides flexibility, if you want to potentially use mixed-sized drives, I would just stick with SHR. To put it in perspective, I set up my RAID array initially as SHR thinking I would use mixed-sized drives and I never did. It's still SHR though, but I will most likely use RAID5/6 for my next array knowing now that I won't mix drives. Don't go crazy is my overall suggestion!

[@mdmeyerpfa]

What about JBOD? When is it appropriate?

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Ultimately, if you just want data without redundancy, but in my opinion, most people should be using RAID.

[@JackupTraining]

So, I should use RAID1 on my DS220+ Good, because that's how it's set up already. Thanks 😁

[@QuikTechSolutions]

Well done!

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks, Tony!

[@DaystromDataConcepts]

I have recently purchased a DS223 and do not use RAID at all. I have two volumes, one per SSD, in order to maximize storage space. The reason I don't use RAID is that it's essentially a cloud server via Synology Drive and is backed up to C2 Storage service each night. Most of the data, over 95% of it, is static and so I would say that RAID is not always necessary, not in all use cases. Of course, I realize the video cannot cover every possible scenario, but it's worth mentioning my use case because it provides an example to the exception to the RAID rule.

[@WunderTechTutorials]

I completely agree that it's not necessary for everyone. In your scenario, using one JBOD or two basic storage pools/volumes sounds like a great option. I wanted to keep it to RAID in this video, but definitely something to consider for a future video! Thank you for the feedback!

[@salto1994]

Very interesting video and well explained. Little question, what monitor do you have in the background, looking to upgrade my 27" to a wide/ultra wide screen and put my macbook pro into a docking station. Thanks in advance for your help

[@WunderTechTutorials]

Thanks! Yes, it's an LG monitor - the whole setup is here: www.wundertech.net/pc-and-av-setup/ It's a great monitor and actually has a docking station built directly in, but it's far more expensive than I would hope.

[@XtianApi]

Don't forget everybody, don't bother choosing a higher performance lower redundancy pool if your network isn't even fast enough to take into consideration that difference