Penquelleion

It seems I haven't made myself clear. When downloading a file, you can download it one byte at a time from start to finish, or you can download it twice as fast by downloading from the start AND from the middle. This is how applications like IDM work, except usually with more than two simultaneous streams. I'm not talking about reading parity from start to finish filling up one parity disk before spilling over onto a second one, I'm talking about reading parity info from the beginning AND the middle, writing both simultaneously to both parity disks. This way, the longest this process will take is the time to read the first 8TB, as the second 8TB was read at the same time.

I've just been having an argument with ChatGPT. I had a thought about the possibility of using two smaller disks in place of a single large disk for cases where people have a single parity setup. For example, 2x8TB drives instead of a single 16TB drive. My idea is, When doing a scheduled parity check, instead of UNRAID scanning the entire system from 0 to 16TB (say) serially, it could be reading from 0 to 8TB for the first 8TB drive, while simultaneously reading from 8TB to 16TB for the second 8TB drive. This should significantly increase performance, nearly doubling, I would think. Even if strict requirements were put in place to be able to enable this feature, such as being the same model drive, or speed, and only when in a single-parity system, etc., I'm having trouble seeing any significant reasons why this wouldn't be possible. ChatGPT insisted it would increase parity computation complexity amongst other things, but it seemed to be thinking that the parity calculation itself would be split across the drives. Having an option to have parity setup in this way would allow people to use older, smaller disks they may have laying around instead of buying increasingly larger, more expensive disks just to use them for parity as the array grows. Personally, I'd just love to have my parity checks done in less than 1 day instead of 2.