arendal

Hi and thank you for your replies. The reason I ask is that like so many others I have a growing collection of movies in my little NAS an I need more storage space. Instead of buying another NAS I want do build my own file server. I have several 500GB to 2TB drives lying around and also a few 3TB USB3 disks. I want to combine as many "small" drives as possible to the array and have one drive letter / share on my nework. And, if possible use the external USB 3.0 drive for parity. If I understan you correctly the share will be seen on the network as 1 share, but when I mangage the Unraid I will see the drives as independent drives? That also means that I can replace the smallest drives one by one to build a bigger share without farmatting or loosing data? This almost seems to good to be true, what is the downside?

Hi, what exatctly happens when you mix drives of different speed and capasity? If I have understood this software correct a single unRAID "drive or array" is made out of several other drives to give you a single drive letter os share on the network. Does that mean that it is the slowest disk that determins the speed? When you combine different 1 2 og 3TB drives in the array the parity drive must be 3TB, right? But, if you have many dives lets say 8 drives that has a combined capasity of 20TB but none of them is bigger than 3TB, it is still sufficient with a 3TB parity drive?