additional empty trays, raid1

[ouvarov]

Hello,

please suggest where to buy trays for n5200.

does anyone use raid1 with n5200? what is your impression / experience?
did you try to switch hdds to test it? how long it takes to rebuild the fresh disk inserted instead of removed on?

i hope to use it as a form of back up solution.
anyone comments on this?

Thank you.

[quick]

Hi....

I understand you wish to create a raid-1 and then just break the mirror by removing a disk with data.

That should be possible, but I don't think the 5200 is ideal for that.

* there are five slots in the 5200
* i think a raid 1 can only be built on two drives (not 100% sure about this)
* 5200 only supports one raid-array per box

That means you will be able to create an array on two drives. And the remaining three can only be used for hot spares.

Based on this a 5200 hw with three slots would be better (assuming it costs less)



From my experience which only spans raid-5 with 5x750GB drives, the rebuild-time by replacing a disk could range from 20 to 40 hours.

* smaller drives would of course be faster
* raid-1 is alot simpler than raid-5, so it should be alot faster as well.

guess others have an opinion on this and can correct me if I am wrong.

[nogami]

quick said:

* i think a raid 1 can only be built on two drives (not 100% sure about this)

According to specs, RAID-1 can be built on any even number of drives, (ie: 2, 4, 6, 8, etc). As long as there is always 1 source drive and 1 mirror drive, it will work properly. So you should be able to build a 2x2 RAID-1 array on the 5200, and have 1 extra drive in the system as a "hot spare".

I suppose it would be safe, but personally, I'd think that a RAID-6 would be more efficient and still allow for 2 drives to fail before being in danger of losing data.

ouvarov said:

please suggest where to buy trays for n5200.

i hope to use it as a form of back up solution.
anyone comments on this?

I think you'll need to buy trays directly from Thecus.

As far as using it as a backup solution, I think it would work wonderfully. I use mine as a RAID-5 backup, and have it back-up computers over my network nightly. There were some issues with earlier firmware, but on the version I'm running (.08), it's pretty much rock solid (up-time of 1 month right now, with no issues).