Moving a PC RAID5 to a NAS: + and - ?


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I currently have a (huge) RAID5 installed locally in my PC with a softRAID card. Somewhere along the line this PC will die or be replaced so that RAID5 is very dependent on it.

 

For this reason, I think moving a dedicated NAS box would be the best option and solution for me. The problem is that I can only remove one drive from the RAID5 without destroying it.

 

What are the options I have to move this? I know about obvious one such as Blu-ray, cloud, etc backup but I believe those are pretty time consuming.

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You will need to populate the NAS first with disks, create a RAID and then copy all the data across over SMB or similar method.

 

Unless you can store the data temporarily somewhere whilst you break the RAID5 and move the disks across and then copy the data over.

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You have to borrow spare hard disks worth the total amount of your data. Transfer it over. Then put your existing drives into NAS (4bay or bigger) and rebuild Raid6 (Yes go for Raid6 with 2 hard disks for redundancy.)  New Raid6 building will be a boring process which can take 1-2 days.

 

Once your setup is ready, transfer over the files which you backed up. Return the borrowed drives to your friends.

 

No way out. The new Raid will format your hard disks anyway.

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Also avoid NAS like the plague, If its a big array and you suspect youll be adding more disks to it then a home made rack server is the way to go. Just get a rack case like a Norco and a P800 RAID card or something similar (can be picked up for 100 bucks with 2xBBU online)

Don't make the same mistake I did using SATA, 20 SATA cables = Major PITA :x you cab get SAS > 4x SATA cables

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This is the reason I prefer snapshot raids for long-term storage. Not "always-up-to-date" but you can remove any HDD you want and still have it intact =)

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