Hardware support für Proxmox - Raid1 or Raid5?

[akcapak]

Prior Info: Since most 4-Bay NAS devices are more powerful (regarding CPU/Ram), this factor is less relevant for my situation. I want to focus solely on comparing the pros of having 4 HDDs versus 2 HDDs.

And yes, I know RAID is not a backup. I will have external drives for weekly manual backups, so please skip that part.

Question: RAID 1 or RAID 5?

I’ve read extensively about this topic, and many people find RAID 1 pointless due to its inefficiency in space utilization (it wastes too much space). Ultimately, it comes down to cost / money. However, 4-Bay NAS devices are also significantly more expensive than 2-Bay ones (in my case, over 50% more). I don’t understand why people suggest investing in a 4-Bay NAS to avoid wasting money while simultaneously paying much more for the 4-Bay option.

Aside from that, the only advantage of having a 4-Bay NAS may be a smoother experience with Plex/Jellyfin*, as we will be streaming our family videos on TV. But I do not know if this would make a remarkable difference.

I appreciate any help!

* I will be running Home Assistant, RaspberryMatic as VM, and Jellyfin/Plex, MQTT, Zigbee2MQTT, Adguard, Docker with Frigate (mit Coral USB) as LXC

 

[ubu]

How much storage space do you need?
How fast (latency / throughput) storage do you need?
How much availability / redundancy do you need?
How much are you able / willing to pay?

How do you backup? /!\ HAVE BACKUP /!\

For my homeserver i have a single 4 TB SSD for my proxmox, if it dies, i have to restore from my backup. This backed up to a PBS, the backup is regulary checked and replicated to an external disk.

If you cannot have temporary loss of function due to your disk dying use RAID.

I would recommend ZFS, you can setup on a single disk, add a mirror disk if you need higher availability, add another mirrored vdev if you need more storage, or exchange your disks for bigger ones and expand your zpool, all without downtime.

/!\ HAVE BACKUP /!\

 

[esi_y]

Question: RAID 1 or RAID 5?

Whenever facing the possibility of having a mirror, I would go for it, it's a no-brainer. The question is, if even that mirror is necessary for home use (as opposed to having one reliable SSD and good cheap large capacity HDD(s) for backups). Considering RAID for "High Availability" is completely forgetting you will be getting downtime if other non-redundant components go down anyhow.

There's no reason to go for RAID5 (in the usual sense) or even RAIDZ1, but economies. It is less performant and more complex to rebuild, classic RAID5 even suffers from the "write hole".

Aside from that, the only advantage of having a 4-Bay NAS may be a smoother experience with Plex/Jellyfin*, as we will be streaming our family videos on TV. But I do not know if this would make a remarkable difference.

Add SSD cache, wherever in the stack. That's all.

PS If I had 4-bays anyhow, I would go for striped mirrors.

 

[LnxBil]

I’ve read extensively about this topic, and many people find RAID 1 pointless due to its inefficiency in space utilization (it wastes too much space).

I would not believe in anything "those people" say. I conccur with @esi_y, it's the go to solution.

 

[ubu]

If you need 100 to 200 TB Archive Storage then you might want to use RAID 6 or RaidZ3 (or ceph), but with 4 Bays, what is the point?

 

[esi_y]

Yeah, for the record, my take was on these small number of drives, the math changes once you get high number of drives.