Upgrading my 4 bay TS-473 to a 8 bay rack unit, 10Gig LAN for my home.
Drives 1-5 will be an SSD RAID 5 volume with three folders that Windows will map; B, P and S
Drive 6 will be a 6TB disk, one volume, mapped as drive M
Drive 7 (empty bay for now)
Drive 8 will be a 24TB disk, one volume, mapped as drive X (backup of SSD RAID)
99% of daily activity will only be for P and S drives; the SSD array. When I access either of these drives and “wake the NAS”, will it also wake and spin up the other HHDs (drives 6 and 8)?
I know drives are designed to run, but they are also designed keep running for years. Spin up, power down, spin up, power down…thousands of times gotta put serious wear on the drives. Something I’d rather avoid.
My fall back is to get two 4-bay rack units and use higher capacity SSDs to fit 4 bays. Thereby only needing to “wake” one unit and let the other sleep.
The way that QNAP OS is installed (across all drives) will prevent the disks from sleep, also make sure to never backup to internal drives (tears when the NAS fails and you cannot access internal drive data), so use external USB drives (or cloud,or other NAS) to backup your data
How is a backup using an “internal” drive risky; from the point of loosing that data on it? It’s a standalone drive. If there were a NAS failure my plan was to pull the drive and all data is still there. I could then install the drive back into a new NAS and QNAP should read it with no issue, or I can put it into a drive dock on my Windows box and read the data (Windows now allows Linux ext4 to be mounted).
If your NAS dies but you need the data on the drive, you cannot read this without special software, the data on the drive is not plain ext, there is additional layers on it.
If you do external backups you can do them in plain NTFS (ext,exFAT,etc) and read them anywhere you like.
Copy. Agree, a couple years ago external drive yes, but now that Win 11 supports ext4 filesystem right from file manager saves a lot of time and heartache for us that don’t know Linux. I may actually do both, use the internal for bi-weekly RAID backups and still use an external for backup every 6 months or so.