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Hello Fellow Gerbils

How is everyone doing?

My question pertains to a QNAP TR-004 external RAID box. I own one of these and have populated it with 4x HGST 4TB drives in a raid 5 array that I use as a backup for my vast collection of media, what I'll refer to as my BU Set. It's a fabulous product, that while not exactly quiet, provides very good performance and allows me some piece of mind. Until now I just turn it on whenever I need to back up some material from an HDD, or when I need some performance oriented photo editing. It was cheap and I am happy I bought it.

Recently I've been editing a documentary in 4k PRORES and a single dedicated HDD is just not fast enough to make for responsive editing. I got a decent deal ($119CDN/ea.) for a set of 4x Toshiba X300 4TB drives. What I would like to do is replace the set of four drives from my BU Set and put in the Toshiba drives to create an Edit Set, which I will build as a RAID 5 as well.

My question is simple; can I do this, have two separate sets of drives that I can move back and forth in the Raid box when I need to? Specifically, is all the RAID information on the drives themselves? Or is there something in the firmware of the RAID box that will be overwritten if I put a different set of disks in it? Also, does it matter if I use the hardware RAID management (the dip switches on the back of the box) or the software RAID manager in Windows?

Thanks very much, in advance.

-(A)-

RAID 5 is unlikely to be faster in practice for editing unless you're limited in streaming bandwidth.

That said - why not mount all 4 internally to avoid being limited by the QNAP?

Waco wrote:

RAID 5 is unlikely to be faster in practice for editing unless you're limited in streaming bandwidth.

That said - why not mount all 4 internally to avoid being limited by the QNAP?

Hi Waco

I have actually found that reads on RAID 5 are much faster than on a single drive, which is what I need for video editing. Here's crystal diskmark scores for a single drive and a RAID 5;

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BUtrc ... p=drive_fs

I've got 10gbs USB3.2 and a high-throughput cable (very important, most normal cables don't support 'superspeed' transfers) to a USB 3.2 port on my mobo. It's been pretty reliably consistent.

To answer the second question, I have a set of drives mounted in the case that are my 'permanent' working drives. The RAID box is great because I can use it as a given project requires, then remove the material as needed and archive it.