Which type of array to choose?

Hey Community,
I’m really impressed of rockstor and want to give it a try. The only question, after testing it without disks, is, which type of array I should choose. I have 4 disks with 2TB of storage and I’m not sure, if I should choose raid1, raid10 or raid6. Data integrity is important as the NAS will be my backup of the data harddrive inside my computer. I’ve looked through the forums and found different opinions so I created this thread to get some input for current version 3.8-9. Thank you. :smile:

I think you want Raid 10, in part because it’s generally pretty robust on data integrity, and also because it’s particularly so (vis-a-vis 5/6) on BTRFS.

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Similar question here, coming from a Synology NAS and now moving to Rockstor on ESXi. I currently have three disks (plus a system SSD): 2TB & 2x 3TB, which were previously used in a so-called dynamic RAID (~5TB usable space & protection against one disk failing).

What should I do to maximise usable space and still keep some protection here? (note: these are mainly media files, for which I do not need a complete backup. A portion of these files, I would like to back up, can snapshots be used for this?)

Thanks!

@Cantello Depends RAID 0/1/10 all work pretty well and are stable. RAID 1 should land ~4TiB of usable space and one disk protection

RAID 5/6 are stable and work well but have some caveats like slow scrubs and broken free space reporting. With only three disks though I wouldn’t recommend RAID 5 as there are some issues recovering if a disk goes out with that few disks.

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