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One of each. There is a small chance that drives made in the same factory will fail at exactly the same time for the same reason when used in RAID 1. While this probably won't happen (if it does it would be in the first month and you will hear about others with the same failures), why risk it. Besides you want hard drive makers to stay in business - all hard drives will crash in the future, the only question is when.
I didn't take my advice for a RAID I built years ago. I just placed the order (one hour ago) to replace a WD red with a Seagate. God only knows when the next drive will fail. I've overall been fine, but I only have one disk redundancy in my zfs system until Thursday.
That actually sounds really smart, but can that cause issues with the raid controller, since the drives will act slightly differently?
I have that exact same setup but with 4 TB disks on zfs in mirrored mode. Have not noticed any performance issues in my home lab setup mainly being used for immich and media serving. I had purposely chosen disks of different brands specifically for this reason. My vote goes to this setup.
ZFS, btrfs, and other software RAID solutions can use mixed drives w/o much issue as long as you make sure that the capacities match or that you set the array up with the smallest disk size in mind.
Do not use hardware raid controllers. They provide no meaningful performance benefit over software raid and make data recovery much more difficultm(if not impossible) in the event of hardware failure.
Not to advertise but that's one of the reasons I haven't moved from synology. They have some special sauce version of raid that allows different drives and sizes without any fuss. I'm mostly attached to the UI but it's nice to know for when one drive dies, I don't have to match it or anything.
What happens if the NAS dies though? What does recovery look like?
Is it possible to recover the data from the drives without Synology's OS? If so what is that process and how difficult is it to do correctly?
I know that with ZFS, recovery is independent of vendor OS and/or hardware, so if the hardware dies you can just throw the drives into any COTS system with enough ports, but I'm genuinely unsure if that is the case for Synology or not.
If the nas dies but the drives are fine, I just grab a new (synology) nas and stick the drives in. The OS will see that it's in a new model, and start the process of migration (anything that needs changing, enabling, or disabling vs the prior unit, hardware and software capabilities, etc). It's super easy; I've done it myself when I upgraded units a few years ago. If the drives die I have local and remote backups.
I believe it is possible to extract data with a standard Linux system, though it's been several years since I looked into it. I don't run raid on my usual machines (well, I have a wd black pcie card with 2x nvme drives running in raid0 on a hw raid chip onboard, but the system is oblivious and thus so am I), so I'd have to do research again if such a situation occurred. I'm not planning on moving away from syno so currently the hypothetical would end up just buying a new unit and being done with it.