Storage & RAID setup

We are testing with the 4-bay version, you could go for a RAID setup as well.  Some example setups you can manage with 4 bays:

• 1 x 1 TB SSD for OS and APP related functionality to get the best performance out of the NAS.
• 3 x 2 TB set up in RAID5 for a bit of long time storage paired with redundancy (the raid array will allow for one HDD failure).
• 1 x 2 TB set up as hot-spare. If one HDD dies, this hot-spare will kick in and repair the array to a normal functioning one, hence that is a little extra safety for your data.

In the screenshot you can see the SSD storage unit listed, we have already set up the SSD. If you wanted to go JBOD or RAID 0/1/5 you can use the volume setup wizard here. There is a lot of flexibility, you could just use 4 HDDs in RAID5 but also go for, say, RAID5 in a 3+1 hot-spare configuration so when one HDD fails, the hot-spare kicks in automatically and repairs the array. But you can also mirror and stripe (RAID 0/1) or simply build a huge JBOD unit and get yourself one massive volume. Choices-choices.

Once your setup and volume is created, initialization is finished really fast. RAID will now typically have to synchronize, this can take hours or minutes depending on volume size and the CPU performance. No worries though as you can go on and use the NAS and even already save files. Meanwhile feel free to play around with the features that ASUSTOR has built-in, from encryption to SMART, it's all there.

filesystem btrfs

For your file system please do select filesystem btrfs as it will open up a feature that you'll like very much, snapshots of your storage volumes. These are an incredibly easy way to restore backups. Btrfs is a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle. So it's not like you have to do snapshots, but if you'd like to make use of the feature, at least you already have your file system compatibibility.