Cold storage with EX2 Ultra - powered on or not?

My Cloud OS 5 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX Series
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I plan to use my EX2 Ultra unti with in RAID 0 configuration for cold storage. In terms of the probability of recovering the data, does it make a difference to power the unit off vs keeping it running 24/7?

Or, for purposes of cold storage, I should rather move the data into the disks by themself, and store the disks separately? I assume RAID 0 in WD may be hard to recover should the EX2 Ultra’s hardware fail in the future.

Current status of my EX2 Ultra unit: it has two WD Red 8TB disks from 2017 or so and it was reporting disk error before a recent rebuild of the RAID array. After the new RAID configuration, I observe an improvement in response-time when attempting to open the shared volume on it in W indows File Explorer.

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Raid 0 - - - lose one drive; lose all data. Recommend using two JBOD volumes instead of Raid 0 (this way, lose one drive; lose HALF the data).

I have to believe that keeping the units off will be better than leaving on 24/7. (I run this way - - - probably online only 10% of the time)

If it’s true cold storage, with infrequent use, I might be inclined to use less complex/cheaper solution like an external USB drive rather than a NAS.

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I keep the third copy of the data with my old EX2 Ultra unit, from 2017/2018. I will power it off then :slight_smile: Having it running 24/7 for years appears to make it less reliable.

And, @NAS_user, thank you for noting that a true cold storage would require a simpler setup. I’ll consider duplicating the data with a larger drive and keeping it offsite, then.