Hi everyone,
As a Christmas present to myself :p, I've ordered a DS620slim with 3 x 4TB WD Red SA500 SSDs in order to retire my DS216+II as a backup NAS. I'm really looking forward to the almost-silence and the performance gain, but am a bit unsure on how to configure the volume. Let me explain:
With 3 spinning disks I would most probably go for a RAID 5 or SHR setup, but with a traditional RAID configuration that distributes parity evenly together with the limited write cycles of SSDs, there seems to be a real chance that multiple SSDs will probably be worn out and fail at the same time. For exactly that reason, Synology has developed RAID F1 - however, this RAID type is not (yet?) available for the more consumer-oriented models such as the DS620slim (yes, I knew that before ordering, but the enterprise models seemed overkill to me plus they are usually louder and don't offer HW transcoding) .
So I'm asking myself whether it's actually worth it to go for a SHR or RAID 5 setup (especially considering the price of SSDs and the risk outlined above) or just leave it as a JBOD volume using the full storage capacity. Or to put it another way: If the probability of two SSDs failing in a RAID array is roughly similar to one SSD failing in a JBOD array, then there seems to be no real gain for going "redundant", just added cost. Finally, I can't say much about the reliability of SSDs, but from what I've read so far they are regarded to be at least as reliable as spinning disks (or even much more).
Regardless of going redundant or not, I'm planning to make a complete weekly backup of my new NAS to my old NAS, plus a daily backup of my most important data to the Synology cloud. Downtime to restore from backup is not a big issue for me, it's for personal use.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
As a Christmas present to myself :p, I've ordered a DS620slim with 3 x 4TB WD Red SA500 SSDs in order to retire my DS216+II as a backup NAS. I'm really looking forward to the almost-silence and the performance gain, but am a bit unsure on how to configure the volume. Let me explain:
With 3 spinning disks I would most probably go for a RAID 5 or SHR setup, but with a traditional RAID configuration that distributes parity evenly together with the limited write cycles of SSDs, there seems to be a real chance that multiple SSDs will probably be worn out and fail at the same time. For exactly that reason, Synology has developed RAID F1 - however, this RAID type is not (yet?) available for the more consumer-oriented models such as the DS620slim (yes, I knew that before ordering, but the enterprise models seemed overkill to me plus they are usually louder and don't offer HW transcoding) .
So I'm asking myself whether it's actually worth it to go for a SHR or RAID 5 setup (especially considering the price of SSDs and the risk outlined above) or just leave it as a JBOD volume using the full storage capacity. Or to put it another way: If the probability of two SSDs failing in a RAID array is roughly similar to one SSD failing in a JBOD array, then there seems to be no real gain for going "redundant", just added cost. Finally, I can't say much about the reliability of SSDs, but from what I've read so far they are regarded to be at least as reliable as spinning disks (or even much more).
Regardless of going redundant or not, I'm planning to make a complete weekly backup of my new NAS to my old NAS, plus a daily backup of my most important data to the Synology cloud. Downtime to restore from backup is not a big issue for me, it's for personal use.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!