Originally Posted by
DJ Bitterbarn
You're right on both counts, and I could have been more clear at first yes. RAID 5 on an OLD NAS. Really old. Like... 600 MHz Celeron old. But for what I use it for it's just sufficient as long as I don't need to rebuild. The plan is to replace in a few years, hopefully before I need to rebuild again! Thankfully the NAS is built like a tank, so it keeps going and going.
And yes, because it's RAID5 on an old NAS it takes forever to have to reformat all the drives and make them talk nice to each other. Not to mention the the final product isn't NTFS formatted either. It's something much stranger that I'm not fully convinced about yet.
The two NASes that I have are not extremely old -- perhaps a couple of years -- and they're still sold. They're Linux devices and use Samba to make the arrays accessible by Windows machines. I suspect that's true of most external RAID devices.