Unless you're using this as a 3-way mirror, it's an expensive false sense of security. With modern drive capacities you need to have TWO drives' worth of redundancy. Otherwise, when one drive fails and you're waiting for the replacement drive to re-silver, you're almost guaranteed a read-error at some point in the process, except now you have ZERO redundancy and so *poof* goes your data.
RAID w/ 3 drives implies RAID3 which has been "dead" for a few years now, basically since drives >1TB became common based upon normal MTBF. Investing in an expensive shiny fire extinguisher is pointless if when you actually NEED it and go to use it, it only sprays for 1 second before being empty.
If you're foolish to buy any off-the-shelf consumer NAS appliance and are dumb enough to use RAID5 still, I hope you're keeping good backups of all your data elsewhere. Because that thing is likely not going to save your data when a drive fails.
You can run RAID5 with 3 drives and have 1 drive redundancy. One of my configurations right now is using exactly that. Having experienced the drive failure in the past, yes, usually the time is limited after a drive failure, but steps can be taken to minimize the loss of the entire array, as copying the most recent/critical data off raid before stressing it with a rebuilding process. An offline backup is still required for critical data.
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RAID w/ 3 drives implies RAID3 which has been "dead" for a few years now, basically since drives >1TB became common based upon normal MTBF. Investing in an expensive shiny fire extinguisher is pointless if when you actually NEED it and go to use it, it only sprays for 1 second before being empty.
If you're foolish to buy any off-the-shelf consumer NAS appliance and are dumb enough to use RAID5 still, I hope you're keeping good backups of all your data elsewhere. Because that thing is likely not going to save your data when a drive fails.
Thank you!