this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Should I bother with raid (self.selfhosted)
submitted 2 days ago by Dust0741 to c/selfhosted
36 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)

Then I setup restic.

It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.

Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won't grow to be that big anyways.

Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

RAID 1 is mirroring. If you accidentally delete a file, or it becomes corrupt (for reasons other than drive failure), RAID 1 will faithfully replicate that delete/corruption to both drives. RAID 1 only protects you from drive failure.

Implement backups before RAID. If you have an extra drive, use it for backups first.

There is only one case when it's smart to use RAID on a machine with no backups, and that's RAID 0 on a read-only server where the data is being replicated in from somewhere else. All other RAID levels only protect against drive failure, and not against the far more common causes of data loss: user- or application-caused data corruption.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I know it’s not totally relevant but I once convinced a company to run their log aggregators with 75 servers and 15 disks in raid0 each.

We relied on the app layer to make sure there was at least 3 copies of the data and if a node's array shat the bed the rest of the cluster would heal and replicate what was lost. Once the DC people swapped the disk we had automation to rebuild the disks and add the host back into the cluster.

It was glorious - 75 servers each splitting the read/write operations 1/75th and then each server splitting that further between 15 disks. Each query had the potential to have ~1100 disks respond in concert, each with a tiny slice of the data you asked for. It was SO fast.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

Big elk stack?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

And that, kids, is a great use of RAID: under some other form of data redundancy.

Great story!