If you have 20TB of data to store, a single drive is safer than splitting it across multiple drives. Few point of failure in total.
First, if you have more than one disk, you should be either getting redundancy through mirroring, or building arrays of several disks with redundant methods like RAID5 / RAID6 / ZFS zraid2.
Second, no single copy of data is safe, you must always have recent, tested backups.
If you are storing your own data a single drive is asking to lose all your data.
3 2 1 for all your important data.
RAID6 only works if the machine is working fine. If something happens that toasts the whole thing then youβre fucked unless you have a backup offsite.
Reducing the number of drives you are running, reduces the risk of losing data. Do you disagree?
Depends entirely on the config. RAID 0? Higher risk. RAID 1? Lower risk.
I run RAID 0 on a couple of external USB drives with a full backup on Google and locally. No worries.
This single point of failure equals to putting all of your eggs in the same basket.
If itβs split up sure, but Iβm talking about a raid > 0 setup and/or having backup copies of your data onto drive #2
Raid0? You mean having two devices stripped across is rather than just one device with no stripping? Raid0 is a risk you take when you care more about performance than downtime to restore a backup.
If I have 20TB of data, it cannot fit on a single 16TB drive. So my options are Raid, or this single drive option. I would always pick the single drive if I could afford it.
Double check that symbol there.
Raid 5 is a great balance of capacity and useful storage with 3 drives. You get 1 drive worth of fault tolerance and 2 drives worth of capacity. I personally have mismatched drives so I run raid 1 in between the matching sizes, and jbod between the raid 1 mirrors (well the zfs equivilent) And my really important data is backed up onto two more drives in raid 10.
