Little linux backup box - wisdom required

[Stewart Russell]

All this talk of drive features has got me questioning my backup strategy,
which is somewhere between ad hoc and none at all. I'm considering setting
up the following box:
* QNAP TS-419P II 4-bay NAS: <
http://www.qnap.com/useng/?lang=en-us&sn=862&c=355&sc=688&t=695&n=3888>
* 4x WD Red 2TB drives.
* Crashplan cloud backup for all my (cross-platform)  machines and the NAS
itself. Anything that can't run Crashplan (not sure how well the Java
client would run on a Raspberry Pi ...) would rsync to the NAS box, which
itself would be running Crashplan.

The QNAP is a little ARM Linux box. I'm not really looking to build a
custom box unless it's cheaper, quieter and uses less power than the QNAP.
It supports a bunch of RAID levels, so could in theory could be a 6TB
RAID5, or a 4TB RAID6 (less the usual system and marketing overhead). I'm
more interested in data integrity than flat-out transfer speed.

If a single drive failed, would either of these RAID levels be able to
realistically carry on without data loss until I replaced the faulty unit?

Is it really worth going for non-sequential serial numbers on the drives?
Apart from buying a single drive from different stores, how would one do
this?

Wisdom appreciated, thanks. Point-and-laugh is also okay, as long as you
say why, and what you'd do better.

cheers,
 Stewart

-- 
http://scruss.com/blog/ - 73 de VA3PID
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