Which RAID for a 4-bay NAS with 8 TB drives?

With 4 drives at 8 TB or below, RAID 5 (or SHR-1 on Synology) gives 24 TB usable with single-drive fault tolerance. For 12 TB+ drives prefer RAID 6 or RAIDZ2.

Should I use RAID or ZFS for a homelab NAS?

ZFS RAIDZ2 is preferred for data integrity (checksums, copy-on-write, scrubbing) when the OS supports it (TrueNAS, Proxmox, Linux, HexOS). Stick with traditional RAID when using Synology DSM or Windows.

Which RAID Should I Use?

Five quick questions. We'll recommend a RAID level and compare every alternative for your setup, with reasoning.

How many drives will you use?

Total drive count in this pool, including any parity drives.

What's the largest drive size you'll use?

Larger drives = longer rebuilds = higher URE risk.

What matters most for this pool?

There are trade-offs — pick what you care about first.

Will you mix different drive sizes?

Traditional RAID treats all drives as the smallest. Some platforms handle mixed sizes natively.

Which platform / OS will host this?

Different platforms enable different RAID options.

All RAID levels for your setup

Open main calculator → Check rebuild risk →