I am building a NAS in RAID 1 (Mirror) mode. Should I buy 2 of the same drive from the same manufacturer? or does it not matter so much?
You must log in or register to comment.
I usually find the cheapest drives and buy multiple of those, but you should be able to assemble a RAID out of different disks, though you’ll be limited to the space of the smallest one in the mirror set.
Also make sure that your RAID systems supports this.
Okay. Where do you buy the disks?
Ebay. If you’re outside the US, you’ll probably be better off with a more local site.
ebay is very international, and is also by far the greatest site for second-hand stuff in most European countries. I normally buy my used drives there.
If you haven’t looked into it, and if you already have the disks of varying capacity, check out JBOD. You will have to configure a system for backups however as you wont have parity like raid1
Raid is not a backup…
I’m aware, but raid 1 is mirroring which is redundancy, a jbod offers no redundancy so a backup would be even more crucial to protecting from data loss. Also i never said raid is a backup.
JBOD via mergerfs and snapraid on top for parity is a possible solution.
Any performance hit for that config, I’ve never heard of that setup before.
Don’t know myself as I have no use case for that setup, but it is a well known setup since several years. If teh performance was bad it wouldn’t be recommended as an alternative as often.
Quite the opposite. Use drives from as many different manufacturers as you can, especially when buying them at the same time. You want to avoid similar lifecycles and similar potential fabrication defects as much as possible, because those things increase the likelihood that they will fall close to each other - particularly with the stress of rebuilding the first one that failed.
To the best of my knowledge, this “drives from the same batch fail at around the same time” folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm.
mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm
It may, performance-wise, but usually not enough to matter for a small self-hosting servers.
