Dedicated RAID for backups?

[Enquiries]

Hi, Great Website and Channel!
I am looking to buy a Lockerstor Gen3 10 bay. I will mostly use it to store my whole family’s backup and photo library (which I would use to edit) and media. I understand as HDD gets filled up its speeds slows down. As I do a lot of photo editing, I want the connection as fast as possible and saturate the 10GB connection. Given the back ups would take the most space, should I dedicate 2 HDD and separate it with a Raid 0 for the backups and the other 8 HDD in RAID 5 for my photos and media? I don’t mind the Volumes / RAID for the backups to be slower. Would such an allocation speed up my media and Photo folders? Or should I just create one big RAID 5 and put them all in one volume?

[ed]

Thanks for the kind words! Great to hear you're considering the Lockerstor Gen3 10-bay—it's a solid choice for both storage capacity and performance.

When it comes to your setup, dedicating 2 drives in RAID 0 for backups while using RAID 5 for photos and media on the other 8 drives can be a good approach if you’re looking to prioritize speed for photo and media editing. RAID 0 will give you faster read/write speeds since it stripes the data across both drives, which is ideal for backups where speed isn’t as critical, but you still want efficiency in transferring large files. However, RAID 0 offers no redundancy, so be sure to have additional backup strategies in place for your backups.

For your media and photo folders, using RAID 5 with 8 drives is a good balance between speed, redundancy, and capacity. RAID 5 will allow for good read speeds, which is important for media editing, while also protecting against a single drive failure. By dedicating your RAID 0 array to backups, you can ensure that the RAID 5 volume for your media and photos gets more bandwidth, improving performance, especially with large files.

Alternatively, if you don’t mind managing the complexity of multiple volumes, creating separate RAID configurations for backups and media is beneficial. However, if you're aiming for simplicity and don't need massive speed gains for backups, a single RAID 5 array for everything would work too. It would give you less flexibility but might be simpler to manage in the long run.

In short, separating the RAID 0 for backups and RAID 5 for media/photos can optimize speeds for your creative work, but it also adds complexity. If you prioritize speed for editing, that separation should help. If you prefer simplicity and redundancy without worrying about managing multiple arrays, a single RAID 5 setup would still give good performance across the board.