QNAP Turbo NAS series provides from 2-bay to 8-bay models for users to execute advanced RAID configurations. The high end 8-bay NAS supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 5+hot spare, 6+hot spare, 10+hot spare configuration. Considering the performance gain and extra redundancy, users can choose the most appropriate RAID configuration according to the demands to reduce the risk data loss caused by hard disk failure. QNAP NAS supports advanced RAID configurations and multiple RAID volumes on a single NAS:
- RAID 0 (Disk Striping): performance gain but without redundancy
RAID 0 (striping disk) combines 2 or more hard drives into one larger volume. The data is written to the hard drive without any parity information and no redundancy is offered.
If you install four hard drives in the Turbo NAS and format the drives as “RAID 0”, the total capacity of the volume is 500GB x 4 = 2TB.
- RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring): allows one disk failure
RAID 1 duplicates the data between two hard drives to provide disk mirroring.
If you install four hard drives in the Turbo NAS and format each pair of hard drives as “RAID 1”, the capacity of each RAID 1 volume is 1TB (500GB + 500GB). The total storage capacity of the NAS is 2TB.
- RAID 5 (Disk Striping with parity): allows one disk failure
The data are striped across all the hard drives in a RAID 5 array. The parity information is distributed and stored across each hard drive. A minimum of three hard drives is required.
If you install four hard drives in the Turbo NAS and format the drives as “RAID 5”, the total capacity of the volume is 500GB x (4-1) = 1.5TB.
- RAID 6 (Disk Striping with 2 parities): allows two disk failure
The data are striped across all the hard drives in a RAID 6 array. RAID 6 differs from RAID 5 that a second set of parity information is stored across the member drives in the array. The total capacity of RAID 6 disk volume is equal to the size of the smallest disk in the array x (no. of hard disks-2). RAID 6 tolerates failure of two hard drives at the same time.
If you install four hard drives in the Turbo NAS and format the drives as “RAID 6”, the total capacity of the volume is 500GB x (4-2) = 1TB.
- RAID 10 (Disk Mirroring and Striping): allows one disk failure from each RAID 1 pair
RAID 10 combines four or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of non-adjacent disks. It provides security by mirroring all the data on a secondary set of disks while using striping across each set of disks to speed up data transfers.
If you install four hard drives in the Turbo NAS and format the drives as “RAID 10”, the total capacity of the volume is 1TB (500GB+ 500GB).
