Storage Spaces or disk management to mirror drives.

[dugimodo]

I have two 4TB seagate green drives of different ages that were giving me issues when used in an old QNAP NAS. One supposedly had a SMART error and the other had an I/O failure (think that was my fault).
They also were in a striped array that failed in some weird QNAP way - data was gone but apps were still there and capacity was down to 4tb not 8, the NAS won't boot without a drive installed and stores installed apps on the drives so maybe it uses some space not in the RAID array for that *shrug* not important just curious. I moved to a newer 4 bay NAS a while ago and this one was only booting up once a week to backup some of that data.

I took them out of the NAS and did a bunch of tests with seatools and haven't been able to fault them but I still don't trust them not to fail on me.
So I thought I'd create a software mirror in windows and use them as non critical storage with some hardware redundancy.

So to the question in the title, should I use windows disk management to create a mirror or storage spaces, and why ?


I kinda need to rationalise my storage but it's a long winded exercise that I can't really be bothered with. I think the QNAP is officially retired after this.
I also built my own NAS a while back as an experiment and that's still sitting there if I need it, but I stole the drives out of it so I'd have to start over.

[piroska]

I like simple.
So I have 2 internal drives and 2 external.
1 of each has my image on them, and my file backups.
The other external has file backups only.

Works for me. I hate raid and such...

[1101]

NEVER use Greens in a NAS. NEVER . Thats why you had issues .
Get a HD designed for use in a NAS.
WD greens are garbage. I guess Seagate Greens are just as bad ?

"Keep it simple" rule applies, so use Disk management to create a 2 Drive Mirror.
Note , that a mirror is not a substitute for a backup. You MUST backup that mirrored partition (drives)
So why even bother with a mirror in a home PC, you are just creating problems for yourself.

Keep it simple, so use one of those drives in the PC, stick the other in a USB case & use for backup. That will give you less issues
A single drive failing in a mirror can end up corrupting both drives in the mirror, seen it happen .
Mirrors on home PC's are more trouble than they are worth .

I wouldnt use Greens on a mirror regardless. You run the risk on sync issues from their power save mode.

[dugimodo]

It's kinda how I feel too, the mirror thing though - it's just me trying to mitigate the reality which is that I'll use one drive, do a backup or two, then never bother to backup again rendering the backup useless.
So a mirror at least gives some hardware failure protection is what I was thinking. I know better but that's just what actually happens.

And as far as not using greens in a NAS, I am aware. I used to have a pair of WD red drives in the NAS, and these 2 green drives in my PC. Once a week the PC was set to back up the NAS onto the two Green drives and that's all they did.
when I replaced the NAS with a larger one I figured the old NAS could take over the backup duties and set it to only boot up once a week and run a backup then shut down again.

The issues around green drives in a NAS are largely around them going to sleep and taking too long to wake up again so the controller thinks a drive is missing. I didn't think this would be an issue in my use case, but apparently it is.

I do have a couple enclosures around so I think I'll do as you suggest but I'm not confident that regular backups are ever going to happen. But it's not a must for me, nothing I have stored is irreplaceable or a major problem if I lose it. Annoying, inconvenient, and time consuming, but not the end of the world so I disagree with the MUST and instead call it a SHOULD.

There are things I don't wan't to lose, some photos, my music collection, some other files. All of that exists in multiple places because I don't want to lose it. Everything else is less important.
Although my NAS has a lot of storage it's all for convenience and none of it really matters.