My little server is running under RAID. Something called Synology Hybrid
RAID (SHR) with data protection of 1 disk fault-tolerance. I'm not sure
what the hell that means, actually.
That does sort of look like RAID 5.
Is that "backup" drive actually just the conglomerate "wasted" drive
in a RAID array?
Basically RAID 5 writes "stripes" across all of the drives in the
array and the way they are laid out, you have one more drive than the
amount of data you can store. When you lose one, the data can be
recovered from the stripes on the other drives.
You can hot swap out the bad one and the system will restore the array
while you work.
I am going the other way with mirroring. It is less efficient in drive
usage but even if you lose the array, you only lose that block of
data. (one drive's worth)
I guess I am simple... I have three external drives, all have all of my
work and files, don't back up systems and programs, don't steal them,
have the install disks and if I have to rebuild I like to start from
scratch anyway... I do have one cloud account for two folders of
recent artwork and business files too... but I really don't know much
about it, I put stuff in, it backs it up at night... Supposed to be
always there for me, I sure hope so