I would buy 1 more 4TB and put them all in the Qnap as one Storage Pool with Raid 5.
That will give you around 10-11TB .
You will still need to back up but having 4 drives as “single disks” is not the way to go.
It sort of misses the point of having a NAS!
The way I see it is that I don’t need all of the drives spinning all the time. I will put most of the load on the first drive that will serve new movies and some files. The other three drives are more of storage an occasional viewing.
If any of the drives will fail, I can just replace it and restore data from my backup. The only challenges is restoring the primary drive if it fails since the Qnap apps are installed on it.
From my knowledge (and I am fairly new to Qnap but not NAS’s ) is they do not spin down !
I have just had a crash and my NAS misplaced 25TB of media !
I have backup of the media but have had to reinstall most apps and setup if a pain.
It will take over 7 days to get my 25TB from my backup NAS (Synology) as it was/is just too hard recovering the media from the lost+found folder that Qnap decide to hide my media.
But if it was a drive (or 2) that packed it in as I have Raid 6 i would just replace the drive/s with no downtime…
It all about recovery/downtime/convenience for me.
I would like to continue this conversation in 6-12 months if you go with your individual drive setup.
I’ve been reading quiet a bit about raid 0, 1, 2, 5, and 6. I still don’t get why raid 5 would be a better option in a 4 bay NAS?
In my current setup I have four drives each dedicated to a specific media task (e.g. Kids, Movies, Music). This drive are equivalent to what a shared folder would be in a raid setup.
If any one of my drives fails, it does not effect the other drives. I can then just plugin a new drive and restore from an extra USB backup drive (e.g., my passport).
The only downfall of a single disk setup is if the system drive fails. But in this case I can have my Plex media library be automatically backed up to cloud service.
How is raid 0 or 5 better than several single disks dedicated to specific media types? Moreover, with single risks drives that I am not accessing are hibernating. Whereas in a raid setup, to access a few files, all three or four drives have to spin.
The reason for RAID is very simple. It contains parity information. From that parity information, ANY missing data can be recreated. Even the whole drive.
In RAID 5 (single parity) or RAID 6 (dual parity), you can lose 1 (or 2) drives without impacting anything. You can continue to operate that way should you so choose. It is advisable (obviously) to replace the drive.
Sure you can mirror, but when you get an error… which drive is correct? You don’t know.
When you stripe, lose one drive, you lose it all because it’s all interwoven. The set cannot survive without ALL drives intact.
In your case, if everything is on the cloud, AND you don’t mind the download time (or limits) to pull it all back then fine. you don’t need RAID.
