2 of 4 Drive Failure-- what now?

Using Raid 10 and so glad I am because I just logged into my EX4 for it to report that 2 drives are bad.

Currently using 4 3TB drives for a 6TB total storage. Using all, but 800 GB at this time.

From what I understand I can simply purchase 2 new 3TB drives and replace the bad ones and the NAS will automatically handle the rest, but if I am going to purchase new drives anyways why not get a larger capacity drives and replace all 4?

Question is what is the best way to do this? Buy a large 6TB external hard drive and back up the data from NAS to that? Can I avoid this somehow?

Thanks,

Jeff

Thanks for your insightful response. In fact most the hard drives are failing the smart self diagnostic test, but so far all data accessable. No I don’t yet have a backup, but the plan today is to purchase all new hard drives plus additional external HDD to backup to.

Your suggestion of jbod with scheduled backup (I believe I saw a synch option too in NAS utilities) is an intreging strategy. It will be a lot less expensive for sure and yield some much needed capacity.

Right now running 4 3TB. I was leaning towards 4 6TB RAID 10= 12TB system to future proof it a bit, but expensive proposition. I guess I could do JBOD with 4 3TB disks and get some capacity. Then backup to single 12TB Hard drive. (do they make them that big… hmm?)

Thanks for the responses. I now understand RAID is not backup and if anything this has been a good lesson as to why it’s important to backup my data. I tried to get away from backups by setting up RAID 10 as opposed to RAID 0 initially. Tempted to try JBOD, but I’m kinda turned off by having to set up multiple shares. I would prefer it to be one virtual drive.

Also wouldn’t there be a read/write performance hit for going JBOD compared to RAID? Is it even noticeable on a NAS? I’m transferring large 30GB to 40GB video files so that’s a factor maybe?

Thanks for all the info.