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Comment by andy800 | Hacker News Reader

RAID-1 always survives a single drive failure too, and it can also survive 2 (or more) disks failing, if they aren't two mirrors of each other (not that I would wait to allow that to happen). But what about when the NAS itself fails (and they almost all do, just read the forums)?

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This is why I've always used either Linux RAID or ZFS.

If the RAID is in software I can slap those disks into anything (like my desktop) and keep going.

If the RAID is NAS specific or on hardware, well, now you need something specific.

Of course you should have backups too, but why add something that will make your life more complicated in an already stressful time?

Synology at least just uses mdadm and lvm under the hood, so any Linux box can read its volumes.

How about Synology SHR? Do you need DSM to rebuild?

What SHR does is take the smallest disk size and create partitions of that size across all disks and raid them together, then take the second smallest disk size and create partitions across all disks with at least that much space and raid them together, then finds the third smallest, etc. [0]

It's all still just lvm partitions and mdadm.

> Do you DSM to rebuild?

Depends what you mean. If a disk fails, I hot-swap a replacement in and press the volume rebuild button in the GUI.

[0] https://kb.synology.com/en-my/DSM/tutorial/What_is_Synology_...

Ah, I see you've updated the question:

> Do you need DSM to rebuild?

I don't think so. I've never had to do it without DSM, but since it is just mdadm and lvm you should be able to connect all the remaining disks to and Linux box and run the appropriate mdadm commands to fix the array.

Ok, thanks!

Yes, I already figured out based on your previous response (and modified the question for others).

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