[PLUG] USB enclosures

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 04 Apr 2017 16:55:00 -0700
Tom <tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com> dijo:

>I understand that you are choosing RAID0 because you need 8+8=16GB of
>storage space instead of redundancy.
>I would advise you against using RAID0 if you care about your data -
>single disk failure and you loose everything.
>JBOD will give you the same storage space at about the same performance
>over 1Gb/s ethernet + you are only risking some of the data, depending
>which disk fails. So, JBOD is lower risk at almost no tradeoff versus
>not-redundant RAID0 over 1Gb/s network.
>RAID0 is really only useful for performance reasons as locally
>connected storage inside a workstation - it doubles the disk speed.
>That being said, local SSD/NVME will beat 2 disk HDD RAID0 in common
>desktop/media/engineering workloads.

Hmm. Interesting thoughts.

You are correct that I chose Raid 0 because I want 16TB of storage
space. It s also true that speed is not a critical consideration to me
for this setup, that is, the speed of the main storage on the USB is
important, but not the speed of the main storage to the Synology
because that is just backup. I don't care how long the backups take
because they run at 2am every night.

It is certainly true that JBOD is lower risk because you probably
wouldn't lose both disks, but this is backup storage. The main storage
would be unlikely to be affected at the same time as a disk failure in
the backup storage. So if I lose the whole backup, I replace the disks,
and make a new backup from the main storage onto the new disks -
nothing lost. And even if one disk in the backup Raid is still good,
I'd replace it anyway, because the disks were purchased and installed
at the same time, so if one goes, the other is probably not far behind.
In fact, even if neither fails, when they get to the end of their
warranty I'd probably replace both anyway. I'd rather keep things from
failing than have to repair stuff under emergency conditions.

JBOD might be a trifle safer, but I still have the main storage and I'd
replace both disks anyway, so this benefit seems negligible to me. Raid
0 is probably faster, but that is also of negligible value to me. It's
a tossup.