I’ve been using a two-bay Synology nas for the last couple of years with 2x 8TB drives and a stupidly large media collection. I recently acquired a four-bay ugreen nas but don’t have any drives for it yet because fuck you AI.
Since I need to have all the same drive size for raid, I was thinking of getting larger disks and taking out a second mortgage. Like start with 2x 12TB and some day add two more. If I do that, I’ll have 2x 8TB that wouldn’t be useful without keeping the Synology running, and I don’t really need both.
The other idea was buying two more 8TB for the new nas, copying the media over, and then moving the two over to make four and decommission the Synology.
I am not well versed in raid, so there easily could be something I’m not considering or a way I should do this to make my life easier.
Also, any advice on how one normally keeps backups with such a large amount of data. I know raid ≠ backup, but right now I’m just praying to the tech gods that the disks keep spinning. I know others out there have large media collections… what do you do?
Some things to think about.
Even ZFS now let’s you add a new drive to an array, and the sweet spot for $/TB is ~16-20TB at the moment, so maybe think about 2 or 3x16TB and add more later (also less power).
Consider manufacturer recertified (not refurbished) server drives from serverpartdeals.com or your local equivalent, after all RAID is there to let you survive a disk failure, it’s treated me well, and lets you avoid SMR drives.
You can mix drives of different sizes if you use Unraid or roll your own with mergerfs+snapraid (+OpenMediaVault perhaps). I do the latter, it’s a bit of a setup, but has the advantage that drives are just drives and you can use the working ones while rebuilding the array and you can recover accidental deletions (for a while), which brings me to ‘RAID is not a backup’.
For true data safety you should have an offline backup (i.e. drives that live disconnected from your computer except during backup, safe from lightning, accidental deletion etc.) and eventually an offsite copy.
Personally I think the AI bought all our drives from WD is likely BS (seems lightly supported) to goose their product prices, so hopefully it’ll blow over, but prices seldom go down, inflation catches up. Sigh.