I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)
Then I setup restic.
It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.
Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won’t grow to be that big anyways.
Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)
Interesting. I suspect you must either have had really bad luck or be using faulty hardware.
In my broad summarising estimate, I only accounted for relatively modern disks like something made in the past 5 years or so. Drives from the 2000s or early 2010s could be significantly worse and I wouldn’t be surprised. It sounds like to me your experience was with drives that are well over a decade old at this point.
@Atemu Well yes, this is experience of self-hosting for close to 25 years, with a mix of drives over those years. I have noticed much better quality drives in the past decade (helium hdds running cooler/longer, nvram, etc) with declining failure rates and less corruption.
But especially if you’re talking about longer time scales like that (“every few decades”), it’s difficult to account for technology changes.
@Atemu Drives from the mid/late-2000s in particular were just poorly behaved for me. Recent drives (2014+) have been much better. Who knows how 2030s drives will behave? So I will continue scrubbing data as I swap out older drives for newer ones.
Oh absolutely; I would never advocate against verifying your data’s integrity.