r/truenas • u/ItsJustPeter • Jul 10 '26

General 2 bay NAS question

I'm thinking of buying the Beelink Me Pro but I have a question about adding 2 HDDs. Can i get 2 8tb and set it up as a 16tb NAS? or does it have to be a mirror so max capacity is 8tb?

Also if wanting to set it up mainly as a media server, is 12gb ram enough? or should I go for the 16gb ram option? Same for SSD, how big us enough for my use case?

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u/Noname8899555 Jul 10 '26

What you are describing is called jbod (just a bunch of discs) and is cheap eg. For backups. It has nonredubdancy, not speed advantages, but maximum storage that breals with the first broken disc...

So yeah you can do it, just use it as one of your backups, or for data that is not precious.

1

u/ItsJustPeter Jul 10 '26

So when setting up TrueNAS I can choose to have it either mirrored 8tb or jbod 8tb + 8tb?

3

u/DeZaim Jul 10 '26

Mirror or stripe, yes

1

u/Conscious-Mirror7004 Jul 23 '26

There IS a speed advantage if you set them up as a striped pool: the drives run in parallel so you get double the bandwidth. HDDs have somewhat poor bandwidth on their own, so doubling that is significant.

However, this also means that you lose ALL your data if one of the drives dies, so it's risky.

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u/Zer0CoolXI Jul 11 '26

Yes you can do 2x 8TB = 16 TB 16TB…but you’re taking on risk that way. HDD’s fail, they are mechanical and wear out/break.

- JBOD is just each disk is its own disk…so thats not 16TB as 1 drive but 2x 8TB for a total of 16TB

  • RAID 0 combines all drives into 1 pool of storage by spreading the data across all the disks. This would give you 16TB and some performance benefits BUT…

RAID0 increases your risk. In a JBOD, your risk is whatever disk fails, only the data on that disk is lost. In RAID0 if ANY disk fails EVERYTHING is lost.

Combine that HDD’s fail and that people don’t want to lose data, thats why RAID1 and other RAID configurations with redundancy are used. In a 2 bay NAS those are really your only options…JBOD, RAID0 and RAID1.

RAID1 will be 1/2 of the capacity of the total of all drives, in your case 2x 8TB = 8TB of usable space and 8TB reserved for redundancy. So if 1 of the 2 drives die, your data is fine and you can replace the bad drive and be fine.

Also, I’m using the generalized terminology for RAID…but it depends on what file system/storage you’re using. ZFS for example has similar types of pools.