@feeling_zen I have had an SSD fail on me! My self built PC’s generally have an SSD for boot up and operating system, all my data is safely stored on an hard disk drive. It is nice for you to agree that an SSD can fail “based on age and IO”. When you make a backup the idea is that it does not fail. SAS server drives are the most reliable out of the traditional hard drive types.
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I’ve been using SSDs to backup my laptops and the music file storage of my Roon NUC for years. I’ve never had one fail. I have a bunch of failed hard drives sitting around.
My Synology is my backup. My library resides on my Samsung 860 Evo 2TB 3.5" SATA SSD inside my Nucleus.
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I’ve had SSD fail too. The claim isn’t that they don’t fail. It’s that they fail less.
By the same token, I’ve got HDDs and SSD running in the machine room that are 20 years old (really early SSD drives from the unreliable era!), and others that lasted 6 months. Everything fails sometimes.
In my experience SAS drives aren’t more reliable than anything else. I’ve had awful luck with poor yields on WD Red HDD drives despite their cost (though WD replaced all for free even out of warranty). I’ve found WD’s low cost SanDisk SSD brand to be at least as reliable as their WD counterparts - though IO performance lower. And on rhe HDD side, I confess that all the drives I’ve seen last decades have been Toshiba and Hitachi despite their low cost. Seagate had poor yield rates in my past but I’ve read they’ve since turned that around to be top class too.
For the big NAS devices, I’ve stuck with WD HDD because of their Red’s high heat tolerance compaired to others and, their failure rate notwithstanding, their replacement policy was great, even for private customers. For cold backups on my home NAS, as it only has large 5.25" removable bays I’ve stuck with HDD. But I’ve suffered drive failures on that backup before and had to redo it - note I lost nothing because live and backup did’t fail at the same time.
For home NAS, it is worth thinking about it like businesses do. There are the “two Rs of business continuity”.
- Redundancy: This addresses decreased downtime. RAID greatly increases (not “ensures” as erroneously stated in some textbooks) the ability to stay in service during certain storage failures. But as atated by others, it’s not a backup. It was this that let my NAS keep running while I waited a week for WD to send replacements for not one but two failed drives in the array. The music never stopped.
- Resiliency. This addresses the ability to recover from an outage that would otherwise be business ending. This is not just your backups, but the entire backup and restore disaster recovery procedure. It includes actually testing your recovery procedure to get back up and running too.
On the latter, not a week goes by (some weeks, not a day goes by) where I don’t tell a customer that they stuffed up their backups of their 40TiB database and they cannot be used for recovery.
Because RAID isn’t backup, it’s not really needed at home in a NAS. It may be desirable for the reasons mentioned to avoid inconvenience, that’s all. So for a Core, a aingle disk is fine. Rather than think about what disk is most reliable, I’d buy three disks of the same size; backup to one; then put the third blank one in the Core and test recovery from the backup. If you are confident the process works, then you run with that: one primary disk, one backup, and one replacement for a failed primary or backup.
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Can we repeat this like another 10 times or more, at least? 
Haha, well with a house of people who whine when they can’t access something on Plex, I do use RAID10 for the redundancy aspect.
But yeah, it’s totally unnecessary for anyone with patience. Which is not my wife or kids.
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Hi I have a DS215j synology 2bay. Which raid should I use. I know its not a back up
RAID1 if only 2 bays
RAID0 is for people who like playing with matches at the gas station.
But another alternative is no RAID at all and just use the second bay to occasionally slot in a backup drive, get your backup, then store that disk somewhere else. I’d only bother with RAID1 if you can also plug in another USB drive to take your cold backups.
[addendum] If you have both video and audio on a NAS, RAID1 or better starts to get useful for other reasons. Because one disk can service the reads for file X and the other disk service read requests for file Y. Starts to be essential for local HD video streaming in a house full of couch potatoes.
Oddly enough I’ve never had an HDD fail completely, but have had an SSD fail totally.
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Thanks I have just music on it. I do use a USB dive to manually add the new music when I get it, then un plug the drive.
I have been running WD Reds without a single issue for eight years so no reliability issues here.
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Same here.
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