Some questions before buy

[yabbah]

Hi, I thought about to buy an diskstation DS411, but as I dont have enough money at the moment, I cant buy 4 x 2TB hdds as I want.

So my questions is:

1. If I put in 1 x 2TB + 2 x 1TB + 1 x 750GB, can I have some redundancy and how much total disc-space will I got?
2. Can I connect the DS to an openvpn-provider (to get anonymity) to use for torrent leeching?

Hope someone can help me with those questions.

Kind regards
yabbah

[HarryPotter]

1) If you setup an SHR volume (1 disk redundancy) you'll get about 2.75 TB.

[yabbah]

If I imstead use 2 x 2TB + 2 x 1TB, how much would it be with shr?
Is there an calculator?
//yabbah

[HarryPotter]

The formula is
Total size minus biggest size (=> 4 Tb in you 2nd example)

[yabbah]

Thanks alot.

Another question, let say I put in 2 x 2TB for start in it, copy all my files into it. And then add 2 x 1TB, will it expand it using SHR then? Or will I have to restart the whole raid and loose my data?
//yabbah

[HarryPotter]

No, you can not add smaller HD than the biggest existing one to an SHR (but you could create a 2nd independent volume with the 2 x 1 TB disks).

[yabbah]

Okey, but if I startup with 2 x 2TB and 2 x 1TB, I got around 4GB of storage, but how much, and which data is redundant ?

Let say one of my 2TB hdd gets broken, have I loose all data then? Would it be better/safer to add them as two separate raids? I just get 3TB of storage, but will it be safer?

//yabbah

[HarryPotter]

First of all: RAID / redundancy has absolutely nothing to do with "safe data". You just dont have any downtime if a HD dies, thats all (this has been explained enough on the forum and everywhere in the internet...)
It doesnt matter which HD dies, therefore the forumla is .... minus BIGGEST size.

[yabbah]

It doesnt matter which HD dies, therefore the forumla is .... minus BIGGEST size.

I think I dont understand, I mean, how can the biggest size (in this case 2TB) keeps data from my other drives (2+1+1TB)?
Or you mean my setup isn't secure and safe? What I want is secured storage, so even if one hdd crash, I still have all my photos and videos of my kids kept
What is the best setup in my case?
//yabbah

[HarryPotter]

Read Wiki s about RAID to get an idea of how data is spread over the disks .

Yes if a HD dies you still have the data. And if a user deletes something unwantred, if it gets stolen, water fire etc you dont have anything. Use external solutions to make backups, but dont talk about it in the context of RAID

[yabbah]

Great, thanks. I think I will get a SHR with 4 x 1.5TB instead, can this be increase if I replace one disk at the time to ley say a 2tb in the future?

//yabbah

[HarryPotter]

Yes it can be increased with larger disks (to get more space you need at least 2 bigger disks).

Formula for space is always total size minus biggest size.