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The argument is: Using RAID you sacrifice storage capacity, in quite significant amounts, to mitigate a low impact risk.
In businesses we use RAID because we cannot afford to be without access to our data for any amount of time when a disc dies (certainly not the day or so it would take to replace and restore from a backup.) Whereas for a home media tank, it's less big a deal that you can't watch some movies/music for a while.
So those that want the most storage for their money prefer to not use RAID and get all the TB's they paid for as available storage, but accept that when a disc dies, they will loose all data therein and it'll take a while to re-rip all their media. (Of course, anything stored on such discs that isn't copies of original media - say downloaded stuff or camera photos, spreadsheet, documents, etc. - will need to be backed up somewhere as there is no "original media" you can recover from.)
Conversely, if you don't mind paying for the storage overhead of RAID, they by all means do so - it's a lot easier and less time consuming to replace a dud disc and let it do a RAID recovery than restore/re-rip with the advantage that you still have access to your data whilst RAID arrays are degraded and/or recovering.
In IT there are many matters we can be quite prescriptive over as they are (for example) standards based or there's "agreed wisdom" as to how to proceed, but for some things there's alternates available and a value judgement is required. This is one such case. So we'll endeavour illustrate the options and the reasons for each, (and there may be passionate advocates of the various alternatives,) but ultimately you'll need to decide for yourself.
Incidentally, if you opt for RAID 5 (which we use in business a lot as it's a good trade off of performance, resilience and capacity,) bear in mind that if the enclosure (ie the NAS chassis itself) fails, it's unlikely that you would be able to "simply" take the discs out and recover them in another box. Whereas with mirrored (RAID 1) discs there's a better chance and with plane vanilla (JBOD) discs, you almost certainly can. Just one more factor to weigh up.
Wiki's articles on RAID are quite good if you wand a primer "standard" RAID technologies - though bear in mind what Sloppy Bob says about how some mfgrs have their own "bespoke" RAID versions boasting additional features (such as easy expand-ability.)
And who thought storage could be so complicated! IT professionals are well used to the conversation with the FD that goes "what do you mean you need to spend 10K on more storage - I can get a 4TB disc for 2.99 in PC-World" and which point we have to roll our eye and explain that "it's a bit more complicated than that....." |
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