hedwards: For somebody like StingingVelvet, I wouldn't just assume that he needs RAID. Especially not for the purposes of backing up games that he can download.
Personally, I don't assume somebody like
StingingVelvet is an idiot.
If he wants to I'm quite sure he can competently use a NAS. No form of RAID is a substitute for backups. RAID is a high availability strategy. It appears he needed additional HDD space for something
other than backing up games that he can download.
hedwards: Sigh, you might want to do some research before you accuse me of nonsense. Those "NAS" things they sell at a typical brick and mortar are a cure worse than the disease. They're proprietary and if something goes wrong, you're completely fucked.
Nonsense. You need to work on your reading comprehension. You seem to have missed the part where I stated that I did not like off the shelf units. What was the tangent about running RAID without the full complement of disks about? As if that was suggested somewhere. JBOD mode on those units are often proprietary as well.
hedwards: As far as running it in a non-redundant fashion, redundancy has nothing to do with NAS, some are and some aren't, the point of them is that they're storage attached to the network. Adding an additional level of complexity and expense isn't something that people should just automatically assume they need.
NAS - Network Attached Storage.
Go with that. Add an additional level of complexity and expense, but be sure you don't use any redundancy with it. Feel free to add in your next post how it's a bad idea to use high density drives in RAID 5 like arrays.