Hello c/homelab!
My NAS currently consists of 6TB of spinning rust, one disk only. As time goes on I increasingly think about how annoying it would be to lose it to a random drive failure.
So, I recently had an idea for a new storage setup when I saw a 2TB M.2 drive for £60-70 online. Given the low price, these drives are likely low-quality and probably cacheless too, but I have a potential solution: If I bought 4 of these and set them up in RAID10, would that be a sensible way to effectively double the speed and increase redundancy?
Yes, I know it’s probably a silly idea when I can just spend more on 2 faster and more reliable drives, but I would like to at least hear from people who might have tried something similar! So what do you think?
You probably don’t need that kind of read/write performance in your average NAS because you’re almost certainly going to be network limited. Not sure what the specs on these cheap ones are, but something like a Samsung 970 evo from a few years ago would more than saturate a 10g link, so doubling that wouldn’t really help.
That said, I recently built a 4 M.2 drive raid0 on my homelab server for some read heavy workloads, and things scaled close to how you’d expect with just mdadm+ext4 (about 80% of the drives’ theoretical maximum bandwidth in fio test). If you can actually use the extra IOPS or disk bandwidth, it works pretty well and was easy to do.