[jshel101]

I recently purchased a DNS-323 NAS, with two 1TB drives. I am having a hard time trying to figure out how to configure my drives. The DNS-323 can use RAID 0 and 1, JBOD, and standard. I originally formatted it as standard, after copying about 500GB of data there. I changed my mind. Then I formatted it with RAID 0. Now I am rethinking this choice. I want to decide on a final config before I get too much data on these drives.

I am going to be storing my iTunes library on there, which amounts to about 350GB, and I also have a bunch of TV shows and movies on there. The total I have right now is around 900GB. If I formatted these drives as standard, then I will have 2 TB available for backup. I am not too worried about losing a drive, since I will be keeping a copy of my iTunes media on an external 1 TB drive. I basically want the best performance with the most available HD space. I can not decide between RAID 0 or Standard. I am hoping someone here can give me some advice on this.

Thanks,

 

[hugh]

It's simple. Do you want the data mirrored or not? Mirrored means real-time redundancy with half the storage.

If the DNS-323 is your only data repository then mirroring makes sense. If the DNS-323 is just a backup device then I would likely opt for more storage

 

[jshel101]

Well it will be a backup device, but I will also store all my movies and TV shows on here, most of which have been converted for iTunes. So it might not be that big of a deal to lose these, if the drive fails. I read that RAID 0 is faster than just having the two standard drives, not in RAID. Is this true? I can't seem to find concrete answers to this. I am leaning towards just increasing my RAID 0 partition to the maximum size of the two drives, if the performance is better than non RAID configuration

 

[grog]

I basically want the best performance with the most available HD space. I can not decide between RAID 0 or Standard.

Here's the difference between the two: standard creates two separate volumes, one on each disk. RAID0 creates one logical volume using both disks and stripes data across them. The capacity will be the same with either configuration so the difference is primarily with the redundancy. With Standard, if you lose one disk then the data on the other disk will still be accessible. With RAID0, if you lose one disk then the whole volume is corrupt so the data on the surviving disk will be gone too.

In theory RAID0 will provide better performance because you are using both drives in parallel. That's what they mean by "striping" - data is written in a stripe across both drives. However, in practice the DNS-323 doesn't have the processing power to take full advantage of both drives anyway so you will see little if any difference between the two.

 

[jshel101]

In theory RAID0 will provide better performance because you are using both drives in parallel. That's what they mean by "striping" - data is written in a stripe across both drives. However, in practice the DNS-323 doesn't have the processing power to take full advantage of both drives anyway so you will see little if any difference between the two.[/

Thanks, I think you made up my mind on this. If the DNS-323 can't handle the speed advantage of RAID0, then I will probably just go with the standard two drives. Meaning another day for formatting and copying data.

 

[edvale]

This article helped me solidify the decision to go with a non-raid setup for my DNS-323. I'm using scripts similar to these to mirror "important" data.

 

[jshel101]

This article helped me solidify the decision to go with a non-raid setup for my DNS-323. I'm using scripts similar to these to mirror "important" data.

Thanks for the links. Gave me some more ideas.

In the article the author mentioned hooking a USB drive up to the DNS-323, but I thought this will only work for a printer. Have you tried hooking up an external drive to it?

 

[edvale]

In the article the author mentioned hooking a USB drive up to the DNS-323, but I thought this will only work for a printer. Have you tried hooking up an external drive to it?

Right, the stock usb driver does not support usb disks, but there is a hack to change this.
I've only tried it with flash drives (works ok), but not with "real" usb disks.