I have two QNAP, a 2 bay with 2x6tb and a 6 bay with 5x8tb, and have just brought one single 8 bay to replace them both.
I cannot migrate the VMs due to mismatch of CPUs, so to get me started, I used 4x3tb disks I had before upgrading to the 8tbs on the old NAS. I have built a raid 5 with them, but don’t want to use them going forward. I have moved all the data from the 2 bay NAS with the 2x6tb and plan to swap out two of the 3tb Disks with these. I am going to buy two 6tb disks to replace the other 3tb disks, and then planned to add the 8tb into the array (losing space I know) but at this stage I only have to buy two more disks. I planned to have 7 disks 4x6tb and 4x8tb in the array, single hot spare allowing me to have two disks fail before things get worrying.
Is this likely to cause any issue on the QNAP, the alternative is a second pool with the 8tb disks giving more space but less spindles on each array.
Happy to listen to views for and against
Hi @BoothsAdmin It looks like your goal is to build a RAID 5 with 7 HDDs (4x6TB + 4x8TB) and keep one additional HDD as a hot spare, right?
Setting aside the fact that mixing 6TB and 8 TB HDD means the RAID will only use 6TB of each HDD, I am curious why you prefer leaving the 8th drive out of the RAID 5. Is there a specific reason not to include it as part of the RAID?
Have you considered using RAID 6 instead? It would allow the RAID to tolerate 2 HDDs failures, which seems closer to the level of redundancy you are aiming for.
to be honest, bad planning on my part, I set the raid to raid 5 for the old 3tb disks and had to move the 4 virtual servers to free up the disks. wasn’t sure you can change the array after creation and nowhere to move the data to to rebuild it.
I could run two arrays, separating the 6tbs and 8tbs, just thought better performance if I had the 7 and one spare would give me time if one died without it affecting performance in any way or putting the array into a two disks failed state (not been there, just not sure how it would act if that was the case)
The whole point of RAID other than RAID 0 is you have redundancy in your data and disks. So it really doesn’t make much difference to leave a drive out. Better to add it in and utilize the space.
