2-bay HOME NAS: RAID1?

1st Official Post

    Having read "My thoughts about RAID" by Dennis and the remarks made by macom and ryecoaaron in the thread "Starting with OMV...", I am begining to wonder if the standard scheme of RAID1 (mirror) in a simple 2-bay home NAS is making much sense?


    I'm studying and planning to setup my first 2-bay home NAS with the following in mind:

    • 2 users + guests
    • local media server (Jellyfin)
    • Docker + Nextcloud (replacing OneDrive)
    • More Docker apps to follow, I'm sure
    • Secure internet connection

    I don't think that we'd have a need for the NAS to be reliably accessible 100% of the time.

    If there would be a failure in the storage drive - which I have yet to experience since the start of the PC era - I think that we could live with an outage of a couple of days while a backup is being recovered.

    So if this first line backup would happen to be the 2nd disk in the 2-bay NAS, then I should expect this recovery to go smoothly.

    As a second line backup, I could use an external harddrive and as a third line backup I could probably connect to my son's NAS elsewhere in the city.

    The only thing I'd need to learn and practise is scheduling backups and recovering these. ;)


    I guess that this perspective very much relies upon trust in the quality of NAS type HDD's and/or previous experiences with that (good or bad).

    As this will be my first dive into a Home NAS and self sufficiency, I'd be interested to hear experts opinions and advice.


    Kind regards, Stephan

    - NAS and Self-hosting student -

    -- OMV Dutch language translator --

    UGREEN DXP2800: N100, 16GB RAM, 128GB NVMe (OS), 1TB NVMe (Apps), 2x 6TB HDD (data + backup), OMV8

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  • macom

    Approved the thread.

    RAID and NAS were great solutions back when cloud storage didn’t exist and SATA/NVMe weren’t around.

    Today, many users don’t need that complexity. A fast USB 3.2 NVMe drive (e.g. 2–4 TB) can deliver 4–10 GB/s — faster than any LAN — and is more than enough for typical use cases.

    USB ≠ slow anymore. USB 3.2 outperforms SATA, and modern drives have better error correction.

    So no, “never use USB drives” is outdated advice.

    Why still use RAID then? Not for speed — but for reliability. Bit errors still happen, and RAID helps reduce that risk.

    Do you care if one bit flips in a movie? Probably not.

    Do you care if it flips in a production system or codebase? Definitely.

    Bottom line: RAID doesn’t replace backups. But if your data must be reliable, use it.

    If not — keep it simple.

    NAS 7.7.23 | D2550 @ 1.86GHz | Ram/Disk: 4 GB / 5,5TB + 8TB | Raid5 + btfrs + Bcache + k3s
    & 3x k3s-worker [ J4105 @ 1.50GHz | Ram/Disk: 8 GB / 256 GB SSD ] & 4x k3s-worker [pi 4 8gb / 64GB SSD]

    Like 1
    • Official Post
    Quote from Rd65

    “never use USB drives” is outdated advice.

    "never use usb drives with raid" is not outdated. usb is still terrible for raid.


    Quote from Rd65

    Do you care if one bit flips in a movie? Probably not.

    Do you care if it flips in a production system or codebase? Definitely.

    Not all raid types detect bitrot.

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    Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest using RAID with USB drives — I was just comparing a fast single USB drive on a USB 3.2 port to a RAID setup in a NAS.

    Of course, you shouldn’t build a RAID using USB drives...

    And yes, not all RAID levels detect or correct bit rot —

    but honestly, if a RAID setup can’t even detect bit rot, it’s not really worth using anyway.

    NAS 7.7.23 | D2550 @ 1.86GHz | Ram/Disk: 4 GB / 5,5TB + 8TB | Raid5 + btfrs + Bcache + k3s
    & 3x k3s-worker [ J4105 @ 1.50GHz | Ram/Disk: 8 GB / 256 GB SSD ] & 4x k3s-worker [pi 4 8gb / 64GB SSD]

    • Official Post
    Quote from Stephan-P

    So if this first line backup would happen to be the 2nd disk in the 2-bay NAS, then I should expect this recovery to go smoothly.

    If you're primarily interested in easy backup, syncing two disks using rsync works well enough. It's easy to setup and, if the primary disk fails, easy recovery is easy as well. (A matter of minutes, not hours.)

    thanks crashtest

    While everything is a bit of a learning curve for me, I'd already dug into the documentation of the Borg backup extension.

    I guess I'll have to check out rsync as well, right?

    - NAS and Self-hosting student -

    -- OMV Dutch language translator --

    UGREEN DXP2800: N100, 16GB RAM, 128GB NVMe (OS), 1TB NVMe (Apps), 2x 6TB HDD (data + backup), OMV8

    OMV Services: Antivirus, Compose, Fail2ban, OwnTone, Scripts, SMB/CIFS, SSH, Tempmon, WeTTY, Write Cache

    Docker apps: AliasVault, BentoPDF, Collabora, FileBrowser, GrampsWeb, Grimmory, Jellyfin, Joplin, Navidrome, NMPplus, RustDesk, Sync-in, VoidAuth

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