I bought one of these and now I’m unclear what I should be doing regarding RAID. Can I not add drives later?

I’m not sure if I’m looking at old data but I’m starting to feel stupid. I’m not super tech literate but I’m typically above average. Also a lot of doom and gloom telling me redundancy isn’t a backup like I don’t already know.

It’s still in box and considering returning it.

Any advice? Sorry for the vague question.

  • AaronStC@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I plan on using it mostly for media (plex). RAID5 sounded good to me but the more I read I started getting scared. The complete lack of redundancy with RAID0 seems bad if I understand correctly I’ll lose everything if one drove fails.

    I was riding the google gsuite unlimited storage gravy train which is now over. I have a good 30 to 40 TB to download. With that much data backing up on the cloud does not seem practical. I’d back up plex database and other configuration files and such.

    • manitcor@lemmy.intai.techEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Raid5 is not as complicated as it seems to be, people going 1/0 prefer the performance increase though that varies based on hardware. For general use raid5 is easy to setup and not hard to understand as you don’t really need to understand it beyond noting how quickly you need to move when X-number of disks start to fail.

      If you are backing up there is nothing to worry about other than be sure to buy drives suited to your usage. If you are going SSD the type of memory used will matter quite a bit. Pick your hardware right and an array of any config will run reliably for years to come.