I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)
Then I setup restic.
It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.
Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won’t grow to be that big anyways.
Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)
RAID 1 can absolutely be faster than a single disk for read perf, and on Linux it is tuned to be faster. It’s not why you’d use it, but it is a feature of RAID. Intuitively, since both disks have exactly the same data, each disk could read different things. Likewise, for writes, you don’t have to write at the same time, as long as they’re always correct (e.g. don’t flip the metadata segment until both have written the data), so you can even get a write boost.
If performance is all you care about, then yeah, go ahead and use RAID 0. But you do get a performance boost with mirroring as well.
Yes, a backup should be tested, but it shouldn’t be relied on. Internet can go down, services can have maintenance, etc, so it’s a lot better to never need it. If you can afford a mirror, it’s having.
You’re missing the point entirely. I never said to use a single disk, I explicitly compared it to RAID0.
As far as data security is concerned, JBOD/linear combination and RAID0 are the same, so you’d obviously use RAID0 if you didn’t need redundancy.