Synology ds218+ NAS

diz79

HI, I was wondering if anyone could help, Ive recently purchased a Synology ds218+ with two bays.


Ive read some info online that you should use both bays, is this definite as im currently using just one 6tb wd red drive and it seems ok (ive backed up on an external).


Im quite new to the NAS world


Thanks in advance

S0litaire

It does not matter if you use one or both bays.

I was running a cheap 2bay with a single 60gb SSD and it was fine.

If you were to add another drive the same size then you could do a few more technical things for either increased read/write speed or some small measure of redundancy. But depending on how the first drive was set up it might needed wiping and starting from scratch.

But if you have backups it should not be too big of a deal.

arciere

Spinning drives are not too expensive these days, I would just buy another one and mirror it (RAID1, although Synology may call it with a different name).
That's pretty much the only configuration I would use with 2 drives, you could do something like RAID0 to get something with better performance, but that doubles the chances of drive failure and data loss.

peterbaker

arciere wrote: »

Spinning drives are not too expensive these days, I would just buy another one and mirror it (RAID1, although Synology may call it with a different name).
That's pretty much the only configuration I would use with 2 drives, you could do something like RAID0 to get something with better performance, but that doubles the chances of drive failure and data loss.

A friend has had a 214play for some years, but recently decided that it was useful to be able to use the RAID functions (or whatever Synology call their iterations of such!) in order to protect a business. She managed to set it up by following quite complex Synology instructions but without having to reformat the existing storage. I guess it helps to leave yourself plenty of headroom on the existing drive or drives so that you can create an extra partition on the second drive/vary partition sizes as necessary (I think the 214play may even have come with two separate drives installed from new, but until recently my friend had scarcely used one of them).

So unless it is absolutely essential to kick off with full RAID real-time backup functionality, then I'd suggest you get used to your new toy first and then do the research to improve it into a really professional setup. I bow to others greater knowledge, but I don't think you need worry about having to reformat from scratch at a later date.

I can also tell you (as an occasional administrator of the system) that the 214play has become a very stable platform via its regular updates, and it is probably 5 years old now.

diz79

Do you think buying another 6tb wd red and putting in the 2nd bay as backup or is it safer to back up on a different HD?

peterbaker

diz79 wrote: »

Do you think buying another 6tb wd red and putting in the 2nd bay as backup or is it safer to back up on a different HD?

I think others might be best qualified to answer, but I will see my friend later tonight and will ask what sort of use the entire system is currently set up to achieve vis-a-vis business backup protection. The part of the NAS I am most familiar with is the ability to stream movies from it wherever in the world I might be!

In a much earlier decade, I had a special tape drive to back up my business files at set times within the one main pc server, and to an extent I would consider that a RAID setup is designed to achieve much the same thing except on a constant real-time basis.

I have half a feeling that what my friend set up via the 214play also included some kind of cloud technology courtesy of Synology as the ultimate back up (i.e. as a backstop if RAID got corrupted somehow?)

molerat

diz79 wrote: »

Do you think buying another 6tb wd red and putting in the 2nd bay as backup or is it safer to back up on a different HD?

You have the second drive in the NAS set as RAID and an external drive - whether 1 or 2 drives in the NAS always have a separate back up.

peterbaker

molerat wrote: »

You have the second drive in the NAS set as RAID and an external drive - whether 1 or 2 drives in the NAS always have a separate back up.

WOuld you recommend Synology's Cloud as the separate backup? Obviously the annual price for a full 6TB is not cheap, but for real-time convenience ... ?

debitcardmayhem

peterbaker wrote: »

WOuld you recommend Synology's Cloud as the separate backup? Obviously the annual price for a full 6TB is not cheap, but for real-time convenience ... ?

Nope, if you need to do a full restore 6TB is going to take a while at UK broadband speeds hardly convenient. Even at good SATA speeds eg 160MB/sec thats 10 hours , at 100mb/sec that is approx 130 hrs [check my maths ed:]

peterbaker

The convenience I was suggesting was ease of an off the shelf solution with constant scan realtime backup to the cloud.

The risks mitigated by a backup regime would usually include individual hard drive crashes of course, but we might remember that any local back up e.g. to an external drive, might always carry with it the risk of simultaneous loss or destruction alongwith the main data copy in a fire for example, or a burglary. 130 hours might be the least of your problems if all local copies disappear simultaneously!

arciere

RAID is NOT a backup. All RAID (1) does is saving you the trouble to copy all your data back from the backup source, should one drive fail.
If you are concerned about your data, you always need a backup solution (tape, external drive, cloud, etc.) which is not a RAID.
RAID is also used for performance, but with 2 bays only the only RAID option you have would be RAID 0 (or its equivalent in Synology terminology). The only problem is that you double your chances of failure, plus if you are using the NAS for storage only, and if it is connected via Ethernet, I doubt you will see much improvement in terms of speeds.