I'm looking at replacing my 2Tb WD NAS drive with a gigabit network enclosure, partly for better speed and partly to increase capacity.
I have a few 1Tb WD drives and am thinking I will revert the WD to it's original config and eBay it (or maybe use it for something else), thus freeing up a 2Tb drive as one of the JBOD drives.
The unit I'm looking at is a Thecus N2200 which seems to have the right spec and price www.thecus.com/products_spec.php?cid=12&pid=178&set_language=english
I don't fully understand JBOD but I was hoping to use the 2Tb and a 1Tb to make a 3Tb drive. Less preferably have two separate network drives (which I don't think the unit above does). I don't want any RAID recovery capability
So can I stick in two dissimilar drives and make them into one contiguous drive?
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Yeah, you can concatenate (span ) one volume across multiple drives with JBOD as it uses a journalling file system. Dont forget tho that the loss of one drive means data lost from both.
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>>I don't want any RAID recovery capability>>
Why if you are effectively paying for the facility, why not use the extra data security, JBOD in an enclosure is no more secure than indy drives, perhaps less so, RAID 0 or stripping is fast though very unsecure in that if one drive fails then all data is lost.
RAID 1 means that your working capacity is halved, i.e. if you have 2 x 2TB drives, total 4 TB then your working capacity is only 2 TB though the data is mirrored so secure if one drive fails.
However with RAID 5 you can have, say, 4 x 1TB drives, the data is spread equally across three drives and a checksum is added to the fourth, if a data drive fails the checksum calculates the missing data when the failed drive is hot swapped and if the checksum drive fails then it simply needs hot swapping thus 4 TB total capacity gives a 3 TB working capacity as well as better data security. Better still Raid 6.
I can declare an interest, I am working with a company that produces very innovative DAS and NAS RAID systems, I wont try to promote on here though would be happy to email details.
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The network storage is really just an aggregation of data held elsewhere, on different computers/disks. Twofold reason - to give network access to common data (e.g. music, pictures etc) and also as a backup. I simply need more space, and with a few 1Tb and 2Tb disks knocking around this seems a way to achieve that, rather than buying a 3Tb NAS disk.
The 2Tb WD NAS I'm currently using is getting low on space and is not gigabit, and can feel extraordinarily slow at times.
4 bay enclosures are a bit out of my price range.
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>> The 2Tb WD NAS I'm currently using is getting low on space and is not gigabit, and can feel
>> extraordinarily slow at times.
My NAS is Gigabit Ethernet attached and it's as fast as locally attached USB2 storage. I can also run virtual machines off it - in fact a simple hack means it supports iSCSI disk access but never had the time to experiment with that.
Smokie I know you understand the risk of going the JBOD route and that the probability of losing all the data is more likely than losing a single disk.... For what it's worth I'm not sure I'd go down this route.
I'd mount one of the drives on the NAS as another folder (mine runs Linux) and then split the files across that. In fact my NAS has shares for media, backups, ISOs/software etc. So I don't even use the single 2Gb volume as one huge dumping ground.
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JBOD - Zero
