NAS vs raid 10/5 on desktop

[attack]

So a friend is building a new desktop and his wife is looking to expand her photography efforts. Currently she uses a 2tb external ssd, however it’s gettinf full. They can’t afford to continue to buy larger SSDs but I think would really get by better having a larger mechanic disk array for backup purposes.

That being said, since he’s building a new desktop there’s time to get an adequate case to house 4 3.5” drives on top of what he currently uses.

I’m familiar with raid 5 in the past (10+ years ago) and of you didn’t get a true XOR controller your array was dirt slow. Is that still the case? Are there any cheap ($100 ish) controllers that can run RAID 5 or am I better off buying larger drives and running a raid 10 off a lower $50 controller?

Or is all this boondoggle worth it and just skip right to a NAS?

Again I would like this to be fairly fast, ~100MB/s transfer speeds.

 

[Janus67]

RAID5 is not recommended anymore due to the fail-2-drives situation and all of your files are gone. The risk of losing a drive will re-slivering a new drive is too high. Most either go for RAID6 (2 drive parity) or RAID10.

Honestly, for ease of use a QNAP/Synology gigabit connected NAS device would likely be the easiest method if it came with 4 bays or more.

 

[HankB]

A prepackaged device is definitely going to be the easiest. If you have an interest in a DIY solution, you can construct a pretty nice NAS based on FreeNAS and using the ZFS filesystem under the cover. (I have no direct experience with FreeNAS but have heard good things about it.)

I have a server with 4x4TB drives in RAIDZ2 (2 parity drives) and another with 6x2TB drives also in RAIDZ2 configuration. I'm running Linux on my servers. Both keep up with my gigabit LAN. I have also lost drives on both and replaced them with no drama. My RAID arrays get scrubbed at least monthly and scrubbing reads all data on all drives so it is more stressful than resilvering a replacement drive.

One more point. RAID is not backup. And backup is not complete w/out an off site component to protect against a disaster.

 

[freakdiablo]

A prepackaged device is definitely going to be the easiest. If you have an interest in a DIY solution, you can construct a pretty nice NAS based on FreeNAS and using the ZFS filesystem under the cover. (I have no direct experience with FreeNAS but have heard good things about it.)

I do have experience with FreeNAS and can confirm it's usefulness if you do go custom built, especially in the area of expandability/"tweakability" (as with most things custom). But to confirm Hank's post, a prebuilt device does have the benefit of ease of setup and in certain cases, speed. When I did my NAS I made the mistake of going with an 8TB array with onboard RAID5, and after the array was s third to a half full, storage access slowed to a crawl.

In many cases a purpose-built NAS will have that advantage, unless you want to add a hardware RAID card to the DIY build (or sticking to the standard RAID0 or RAID1), which of course adds complexity and cost. In many cases costing more than the stand-alone device when the rest of the components are taken into account.

 

[Woomack]

New NAS have often quite fast CPUs and memory so offer about as high performance as a dedicated PC (at least on HDD). Depends on the setup it may cost more or less so have to check what you exactly need.

There are no cheap and good RAID controllers for RAID5. It also needs additional cache to work at acceptable speed. There can be some compatibility issues on some motherboards what you have to consider building a NAS.
As it was mentioned, the best option regarding speed, faster recovery and other things seems RAID10 so at least 4 drives. For that can be used even integrated controller on the motherboard (both Intel and AMD can handle that). Integrated controllers are also faster than most HBA.

NAS like QNAP/Synology is probably better idea as it takes less space, usually uses less power, is easier to configure and manufacturer guarantees it will work (on FreeNAS or other NAS software you have to do everything yourself). QNAP has also NBD warranty if I'm right but I'm not sure if it's available in US.