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I have a question about creating volumes on a 6 bay nas server with 24 TB of space with RAID 5

we are a school and we want to store all the school's data on the nas server.

like student's and teacher's temp folders, videos, backups, department's data, learning materials, archives.

how many volumes should I create?

is it advised to create one volume?

should I create a volume just for backups?

spirited
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    What you not should do is create *any* RAID5 volume. We can't answer the rest for you - only you know what is useful in your environment. And if the "backup" volume is meant to contain backups of the data on the other volumes: This is **not** a backup - if you have issues with the NAS, your backup will be also gone. – Sven Oct 01 '14 at 05:21
  • the backups are other computers backups – spirited Oct 01 '14 at 05:26
  • "_What you not should do is create any RAID5 volume._" what do you mean? – spirited Oct 01 '14 at 05:26
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    RAID5 is not useful anymore, use RAID6 or RAID10 instead. RAID5 has the problem that you have no redundancy left if a single disk fails and you are very exposed to additional failures during the lengthy rebuild phase. See http://serverfault.com/questions/339128/what-are-the-different-widely-used-raid-levels-and-when-should-i-consider-them for more info. – Sven Oct 01 '14 at 05:31
  • I have a freeNas server to backup the Nas server every week so I've got that handled. – spirited Oct 01 '14 at 05:45
  • whats the point of creating different volumes? – spirited Oct 01 '14 at 07:28
  • @spirited - just to reiterate what SvW said - it's almost negligent of NAS manufacturers to be selling RAID5 devices these days - we can bore you with the details but it boils down to today's large slow disks such as yours essentially guaranteeing write errors when fully written to - so in the event of any disk failing you'll replace that disk and it WILL have data on it that can't ever be read again - RAID6 or 10 don't have this problem - use those. Oh and one big volume and don't store backup data anywhere near primary data ok. – Chopper3 Oct 01 '14 at 07:47

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It is just 6 bay nas. For better space efficiency, you'd better using one volume. You can use multiple partitions on single Raid volume to serve users.

On the other hands beware that, if one of the disks fails, it can take more than a day to rebuild raid5 volume. And risk(or probability) of raid5 to fail during the rebuild is too high. Moreover, I/O speed of raid5 is rather poor and I doubt its performance is enough for your school. It's why people recommend to avoid Raid5. Raid10(for better performance) or Raid6(slow but much safe than raid5) will be much better choice.

Jihun
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  • thanks for the reply, but as I backup my Nas server on a freeNas server on a weekly basis, that is taken care of. – spirited Oct 01 '14 at 07:42