One other strike against RAID - you need to use "server grade" drives which are more expensive - the more affordable drives on the market will fail much quicker in a RAID configured NAS drive.
The company that I’ve purchased all my computers from over the past 30 years (and now good friends) recommends to all their customers contemplating RAID of any type to use server grade drive ONLY. They seen far to many standard drives fail within 12 months.
Having said that - I use a NAS drive configured as mirrored RAID to provide protection against hard disk failure of my music library. It works well, is really simple to recover (just pop in a new drive) and is extremely stable. I keep it in the basement where it is nice and cool, which it appreciates.
I first tried the NAS drive using a couple of standard drives (from a couple of redundant and hardly used USB drives) just to see how a serving music from a NAS drive would perform - perhaps thinking that the case for server grade drives had been "overstated"? - RESULT: one drive failed within 6 months. I replaced both drives with server grade drives and 4 years later - still not missing a beat :-)
Convenience, is perhaps the biggest selling point of RAID. If a drive fails there is minimal down-time - unless both drives fail (always a possibility, but quite rare according to my computer buddies)
Server grade drives are more robust and fail with much less frequency - since they are built to handle far more transfers that what is required from serving up music in a home environment.
I agree with other posters...
- RAID is NOT a backup!
- it may have some other "warts", but I have yet to experience them - perhaps due to my network configuration
BTW - I use a Dlink NAS drive - configured with two server grade drives - cost me around $450 - jeepers - I’ve got cables that cost more than that !!!
"Perfect Solution" maybe not - but it sure does reduce the need of having to restore from a backup - at least so far :-)
Regards...
The company that I’ve purchased all my computers from over the past 30 years (and now good friends) recommends to all their customers contemplating RAID of any type to use server grade drive ONLY. They seen far to many standard drives fail within 12 months.
Having said that - I use a NAS drive configured as mirrored RAID to provide protection against hard disk failure of my music library. It works well, is really simple to recover (just pop in a new drive) and is extremely stable. I keep it in the basement where it is nice and cool, which it appreciates.
I first tried the NAS drive using a couple of standard drives (from a couple of redundant and hardly used USB drives) just to see how a serving music from a NAS drive would perform - perhaps thinking that the case for server grade drives had been "overstated"? - RESULT: one drive failed within 6 months. I replaced both drives with server grade drives and 4 years later - still not missing a beat :-)
Convenience, is perhaps the biggest selling point of RAID. If a drive fails there is minimal down-time - unless both drives fail (always a possibility, but quite rare according to my computer buddies)
Server grade drives are more robust and fail with much less frequency - since they are built to handle far more transfers that what is required from serving up music in a home environment.
I agree with other posters...
- RAID is NOT a backup!
- it may have some other "warts", but I have yet to experience them - perhaps due to my network configuration
BTW - I use a Dlink NAS drive - configured with two server grade drives - cost me around $450 - jeepers - I’ve got cables that cost more than that !!!
"Perfect Solution" maybe not - but it sure does reduce the need of having to restore from a backup - at least so far :-)
Regards...