Raid 0 Vs JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) (Hardware)

Hi there

Was wondering if RAID 0 (hardware) was faster than JBOD (just a Bunch of Disks). - Some of these 2 / 4 bay HDD devices have hardware RAID / JBOD / Individual HDD settings.

Note RAID 0 (speed) --not interested in RAID 1 / 10 which these boxes do --I've enough backup if an HDD in the array goes bonkers !!!.

Anybody got any thoughts on this -- I think the JBOD idea is a bit like Ms Storage spaces - which in theory should be OK as you can use different size HDD's but I read that people lose data with it etc -- also the HDD bays do this with their own hardware and can connect to computer either via SATA or USB3 - SATA is the best of course but a decent USB 3 (or better USB3.1) still would give decent transfer speed.

Most of these boxes have a switch to set to RAID0 / RAID 1 / RAID 10 (sometimes) JBOD or None - all done with a hardware card in the device.

Cheers
jimbo

JBOD will create standard folders on each drive just like your normal PC hard drives. Say you have a 3 TB disk and a 2 TB disk for example. You create a folder called Movies on the 3 TB disk. The NAS will display the Movies folder, it will have 3 TB space available, and everything you put in the Movies folder will go onto that hard drive.

Create a Documents folder on the 2 TB drive, it will have 2 TB space available and everything you put in Documents will go onto that hard drive.

JBOD is slower than Raid 0 because it is accessing only on drive at a time for each entire file. RAID 0 accesses both drives at the same time.

Unless you are running 10Gb Ethernet, your bottleneck is likely your network rather than the speed of your NAS device.

NavyLCDR said:

JBOD will create standard folders on each drive just like your normal PC hard drives. Say you have a 3 TB disk and a 2 TB disk for example. You create a folder called Movies on the 3 TB disk. The NAS will display the Movies folder, it will have 3 TB space available, and everything you put in the Movies folder will go onto that hard drive.

Create a Documents folder on the 2 TB drive, it will have 2 TB space available and everything you put in Documents will go onto that hard drive.

JBOD is slower than Raid 0 because it is accessing only on drive at a time for each entire file. RAID 0 accesses both drives at the same time.

Hi there

If JBOD actually works as separate HDD's then why have ANOTHER setting for Discrete / individual drives !! what's the difference then.

I can see why RAID 0 is in theory faster especially with a bit of striping but why have two settings - 1 for JBOD and another for Individual Disks.

Something is wrong here I'm sure.

I'm mainly using NAS for Movies / Audio streaming so HDD speed isn't consideration there -- however for running VM's etc then speed of HDD's is important - even over 1 Gb LAN - however these boxes can be locally attached to different PC's so the LAN speed is irrelevant for the stuff I want to use them for.

The documentation is in Chinese (no English) and it definitely has text for each of the settings - can't understand Chinese but from the tech spec seems that there is a difference between RAID/JBOD/Individual HDD's.

Cheers
jimbo

My NAS doesn't have both JBOD and Individual Disk settings, it just has JBOD and RAID. It is currently in JBOD mode. This is what I see on my NAS web interface:



It is obviously treating both disks separately, Volume_1 and Volume_2. Each has their own folders, each has their own New Folder icon. When I access the NAS in Windows I don't see Volume_1 and Volume_2, I only see the shared folders on one server:



Also, what is interesting is that in my Server1 folder, I cannot create new folders from Windows. I have to go to the web interface to create new folders. This is because the NAS would not onto which disk to create the new folder from Windows. If I go into one of the folders, I can create new subfolders - because then the NAS knows which disk to create it on.

I suspect your JBOD setting would work the same. I also suspect your individual disk settings would probably present only two folders in a Windows file manager screen: Volume_1 and Volume_2 or Disk_1 and Disk_2, then under those would be the subfolders you create on each disk.

Another difference, it would seem, would be folder permissions. On my NAS, under JBOD setting, I control which users have access to each folder on the disk. It would seem like under individual disk setting (if my NAS had one), I would only control which users have access to each entire disk.

I have just purchased a second NAS and 2 x 3TB hard drives and I am in the process of copying files because I won't both to be set up as Raid 1 so I have built in redundancy.

Hi,

I can see why RAID 0 is in theory faster especially with a bit of striping but why have two settings - 1 for JBOD and another for Individual Disks.

Isn't it so that JBOD allows for spanning of disks/volumes whereas Individual Disks would not ?

Cheers,

Yes, you are correct. I just formatted disks again in my NAS and that was what the help screens stated.