DS2411+ Questions - Ideas

[SaNE]

Would most poeple opt for a raid 6 set with this type of device?

I haven't polled everyone with one, so I can't give you a real answer. Personally I would considering you're purchasing the drives at the same time and they will all start to fail around the same time.

When looking at setting up a Raid 6 setup with this device you could look at losing 2 or more drives for fault tolerance? What sort of total storage would be left after setting up a raid 6 setup out of the total 36tb?

Raid6 can lose both parity drives before you've got data that is unrecoverable.
Storage space: Each drive is 2.73TB x 10 usable drives out of 12 in Raid6 = 27~TB usable space, maybe just under.

Would you lose 6tb straight out or would this require more data set aside to cover any redundancy in the raid setup?
In Raid6 the 2 drives are simply not there for the purposes of usable space.

Could you opted to set aside more data for redundancy if you wanted or would you have to setup 2 raid 6 systems of 6 drives with the device?

You could use Raid10 or 2 Raid6 volumes, the latter would prove more space, 21.46TB to be exact; compared to the former which would be just over 16TB.
You can see the raid types using this tool from Synology http://www.synology.com/support/RAID_ca ... hp?lang=us (keeping in mind that it's 2.73TB per drive and there's a small overhead on top of that.)

[Auld]

We pretty much only use the 3TB Greens in the Synology boxes, no problems with them performance wise. Can get about 450MB/s out of the 10GigE Synology 12-bays. Had the odd failure but that is about 3 drives out of 150 total, so far no data loss and the RAID has rebuilt fine.

Stick with RAID 5 or 6 depending on how you feel about redundancy. Personally all the Synology we build are RAID5, these boxes are typically the back-up device and so data is replicated elsewhere. If you are really worried you are better off buying a cold spare so if you have a drive failure you can put the spare in straight away and start the rebuild. I'd probably go with RAID6 in your case.

I'm not sure where Sane gets the "Drive purchased together fail together" but this is definitely not my experience.

[kablekill]

Putting aside the lack of accounting for the real data on the drives.

The last lot of hd I picked up 8 x 2tb drives are all still working fine I am just looking at moving the data off these drives and on to something that offers some more stability and I think that this device will offer that. With a few nice extra options as well.

Really just confirming what I suppected with the raid setup with the drives thats all as its not something that I have done in the past.

Thanks for the replys guy quick to the mark!

[SaNE]

I'm not sure where Sane gets the "Drive purchased together fail together" but this is definitely not my experience.

6 1TB Greens from '08 of the same batch packed it up in February, that is after running 24x7 in a raid5 array practically since I got them; might not be the norm but I'm cautiously sceptical.

You should have a backup of your 'can't live without' data with either Raid option, it's just a matter of which is going to leave you with the best rebuild option over the chance of losing all that data.

Can get about 450MB/s out of the 10GigE Synology 12-bays.

Very nice, 10GbE is what I'm looking into (a little overkill for my needs but why not).

[Auld]

@Sane - Definitely had experience with drives that have been spinning 24/7 for years dying the first time you power down the RAID unit . Not necessarily the same batch of drives though, I just expect the 5 years @ 24/7 run time is the lifetime of the drives. We always back arrays like that up before moving them.

I can't agree enough with the "RAID is not a back-up" sentiments. All essential data should be in at least two separate places.

Synology claim 1000MB/s from their units over 10GigE. The use SSDs in the unit, RAID0 and link aggregate two 10GigE connections. My 450MB/s is a single 10GigE link to the switch, 2 x AFP connected Macs, 3TB Green drives. So I get a bit over 200MB/s to each machine, singularly they pull about 300MB/s.