The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/jaywaykil on 2025-04-13 02:40:36.
I'm building my first small NAS from an old PC just to see if I could do it. Four 4TB WD Red with an SSD Boot running OpenMediaVault. Everything going together nicely, and I'm dusting the cobwebs off my limited computer building and Unix/Linux experience from literally decades ago. Enjoying myself quite a bit, actually.
I'm fully aware that RAID "is not a backup", except in my case this RAID system is literally a backup. I don't plan to work off this NAS; instead it will be a place to back up other things. Phones, pictures, computers, etc. If I get everything working I will immediately start on a better (larger, faster) system with a goal of eliminating all cloud storage. VPN for remote access, media server, etc. But this one will remain as a backup.
It was taking forever just to create the RAID 5 on this old computer. I see that OMV wants a restart, so I start researching whether it's possible/suggested to reboot in the middle of a RAID build (consensus answer: maybe but DO NOT CHANCE IT!!!).
Now I'm seeing all the articles stating that RAID 5 is super risky, no one uses it anymore, etc. And even RAID 6 is getting risky.
I'm starting to get nervous. It's looking like 10+ hours just to create the drive. Maybe several days to rebuild in case of a single drive failure? And since all 4 were bought at the same time, if one drive goes down the chance of a second going down during the stress of a rebuilt is much higher. I've suffered a dual drive failure before (main drive and the external backup), and lost several years of pictures of my kids because of it. I want this backup to be rock-solid.
WD Red are reliable, and this won't be an enterprise device being accessed constantly. But should I just wipe this drive (it's empty) and go with RAID 6, or maybe 10? It'll reduce my capacity from around 11TB to 7TB or so.