Hi guys, I've been asked to help setup a small office network and while i am competent enough to setup the network i just need a little advice on how to go about the NAS and backup side of things. Now when i say small office i mean small, the basic run down of the setup will be:
the internet modem / wifi router
2 Notebooks
1 or 2 networked printers
NAS
Now my questions are, with most NAS's these days i see that they can be fairly easily setup as RAID with most having some sort of on board software to select the RAID format you want. My knowledge of RAID is limited at the moment (still learning) but from what I've read RAID 5 looks like a good setup to help in the prevention of data loss when a drive fails, but also still maintaining a good amount of overall storage space when compared to say RAID 1.
Is it possible to setup a 4-Bay Hotswappable NAS with 3 of the drives in a RAID 5 array and the 4th drive as a separate backup drive that can be removed at the end of each day (this drive will be taken offsite each night)? So i was looking at say 3 x 1TB HDD in RAID 5 giving 2TB total storage, and a separate 2TB HDD for backup.
The second option i was looking into, which is probably easier from my perspective to setup, was a 4-Bay NAS setup as RAID 5, and use an external HDD as a backup drive.
Any opinions/advice on the above would be appreciated, is there a better way i could set it up? is RAID 5 the right choice? thanks.