Ahsay Knowledge Base & Discussion Forum • iscsi storage on QNAP.
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Hi all we have about 10 customers to backup.
we have a server in a data centre with a Qnap attached 6TB of data available. what would be the best way to use the space for backup? one big drive or split into multiple drives.
In my experience, you want as many disks in the array, with as much redundancy as possible. E.g. if it's a 8 drive unit, go for RAID6 with a hot spare.
Putting it all in 1 LUN means customers' data allocations can grow without having to worry about running out of room on the partition.
If you start splitting it into separate partitions you have more to monitor, and less you can do about it if 1 of the 5 customers you have on that partition starts taking all the space. At least with just 1 partition you throw more/bigger disks at it, and everyone benefits.
Out of interest, what QNAP model are you using? We had a couple that are about 3 years old now, and couldn't get the iSCSI stable on them (kept dropping the connection). Never did manage to find out if it was a Windows or QNAP problem. We ended up moving to IBM DAS devices.
I have created 1 big lun.
Bob T Bunny wrote: Putting it all in 1 LUN means customers' data allocations can grow without having to worry about running out of room on the partition.
BUT, I'd use RAID10. Rebuild/Online capacity expansion times on large arrays and the degraded performance during those periods, and the potential for torn writes due to excessively high latency is unacceptable to me.
Most companies I have worked for all have used a majority of raid 5 for back up purposes.
I agree with wwcrossww we have alot of qnaps running and we run all those in raid 5.
you cant use raid 5 there anymore, its deprecated for at least 2 years now.
that said i recommend not to use one big partition.
you may loose a little capacity but for upgrade, system shifts and so on its better to have multiple not that big.
its easier to copy or move or mangle.
also some little dirty trick.
i know its not the real fine english way but it does work well.
so that way youre not gonna loose much space by splitting them up and youre still able to mangle em if needed.