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)
I absolutely would, for a few reasons:
Read perf would be the same or better if you didn’t add redundancy as you’d obviously use RAID0.
RAID is never in any way something that can replace a backup. If the backup cannot be restored, you didn’t have a backup in the first place. Test your backups.
If you don’t trust 1 backup, you should make a second backup rather than using RAID.
The one and only thing RAID has going for it is minimising downtime. For most home use-cases though, the 3rd 9 which this would provide is hardly relevant IMHO.
RAID 1 can absolutely be faster than a single disk for read perf, and on Linux it is tuned to be faster. It’s not why you’d use it, but it is a feature of RAID. Intuitively, since both disks have exactly the same data, each disk could read different things. Likewise, for writes, you don’t have to write at the same time, as long as they’re always correct (e.g. don’t flip the metadata segment until both have written the data), so you can even get a write boost.
If performance is all you care about, then yeah, go ahead and use RAID 0. But you do get a performance boost with mirroring as well.
Yes, a backup should be tested, but it shouldn’t be relied on. Internet can go down, services can have maintenance, etc, so it’s a lot better to never need it. If you can afford a mirror, it’s having.
You’re missing the point entirely. I never said to use a single disk, I explicitly compared it to RAID0.
As far as data security is concerned, JBOD/linear combination and RAID0 are the same, so you’d obviously use RAID0 if you didn’t need redundancy.
No, JBOD is not the same as RAID0. With RAID0, you always need the disks in sync because reads need to alternate. With JBOD, as long as your reads are distributed, only one disk at a time needs to be active for a given read and you can benefit from simultaneous reads on different disks. RAID0 will probably give the biggest speedup in a single user scenario, whereas I’d expect JBOD to potentially outperform in a multiuser scenario assuming your OS and filesystem is tuned for it.
RAID0 is pretty much never the solution, and I’d much rather have JBOD than RAID0 in almost every scenario.
RAID1 gives you redundancy while preserving the ability for disks to independently seek, so on competent systems (e.g. Linux and BSD), you’ll get a performance speedup over a single disk and get something that rivals RAID0 in practice. You wouldn’t use it for performance because JBOD is probably just as fast in practice without the storage overhead penalty (again, assuming you properly distribute reads across disks), but you do get some performance benefits, which is nice.