I mucked that up :)

Last year I got myself a Terra-master NAs and two 6TB hard drives, I put them in raid 1, I decided to buy another couple of drives a few days ago and went for 2x8TB units.
Raid 1 I will get a total of 14TB storage, minus over heads, so the two 6TB drives are one pool and the two 8TB are another pool. Anyway, looking at Seagate raid calculator, I could have used raid 5 and get 18TB of storage, the problem is 4TB is not used, but I would get more storage.

Anyway, decided top stick with the two raid 1, if next year I decide to get a DAS, I can stick the two 6TB ones in that and get another two 8TB drives, then it would be easier to move the data from the 6TB drives as they will not be linked to the 8TB drives if in raid 5. But it does show that i should have looked in the first place, and I need to get some more info on raid.

Yeh hard lessons with RAID is that in a mixed size drive stripe - the 'extra over' on the larger drives can effectively be ignored.

RAID calculators are your friend

Worth looking at RAID rebuild times and bit error rates on these TB monster drives. I tend to go for more (4x2tb or 8x2tb) smaller drives; but today that’s getting harder with the volumes of data people want to store. !!

Cost per GB pretty hard to ignore on the larger drives though. I’m running 8 x 12TB on a Synology I built in 2018. Data scrubbing does admittedly take….a while 🤣

Not had to rebuild the stripe yet due to drive failure. 5 warranty on these ironwolf drives. So far been OK…😬

You don't need to "move" data when upping the size of the drives in a RAID array. Just put in the new drives, one by one, and the rebuild will preserve the data and up the capacity. It can take a while to fully rebuild as you have to put one new drive in, wait for the rebuild to complete, and so on with all the drives.

There's absolutely no reason to have two RAID 1 arrays rather than a single RAID 5. With the RAID 5 you get better performance and higher capacity. Some NASs allow you to upgrade a 2 disk array to a 3 or 4 disk (or more) one. Synology are very good in this respect.

What the heck do you use all that storage for? I get away with a 1TB NVME and a couple of 500GB spinners for data and a 500GB spinner and portable SSD 1TB for backups.

You live and learn!

Just make sure you also have backups of your data. I can't recall where I kept reading this: "RAID is not a backup" (probably QNAP forums).

As has been mentioned, the rebuild times for RAID5 arrays can be some time, but in a 4 drive configuration offers a decent mix of storage and redundancy.

My 6 bay NAS has 2x500GB SSDs in one storage pool (RAID1 / mirrored) for the system, then 4 x 10TB drives in RAID5 configuration for data.

Currently I'm only using 4.1TB of the ~27TB space, but that will change over time (I'm a data hoarder...so phone pics / videos etc. all saved).

Eventually it may become a challenge to keep it all backed up, but at the moment it's manageable!

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Yeh hard lessons with RAID is that in a mixed size drive stripe - the 'extra over' on the larger drives can effectively be ignored.

RAID calculators are your friend

I never really looked into it much before, just learning the stuff I need to learn. Tonight I am going to watch some videos to learn more.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

You don't need to "move" data when upping the size of the drives in a RAID array. Just put in the new drives, one by one, and the rebuild will preserve the data and up the capacity. It can take a while to fully rebuild as you have to put one new drive in, wait for the rebuild to complete, and so on with all the drives.

There's absolutely no reason to have two RAID 1 arrays rather than a single RAID 5. With the RAID 5 you get better performance and higher capacity. Some NASs allow you to upgrade a 2 disk array to a 3 or 4 disk (or more) one. Synology are very good in this respect.

Oh yeah, silly me, I should have thought about that.
I have not put anything on the drives yet, so I will do that tonight.

I got myself a terramaster f4-210 last year, not high spec, but it works ok, only has 1GB of ram and a quad core Arm chip, but for storage it works fine. They do make one with 2GB of ram.