Bustom5

That helped me make some decision as to how I will configure my storage. Thank you both!

I am looking for some assistance trying to figure out the best way to setup my drives. My plan is to have two windows VM's and as much storage as possible available while only utilizing the 2 HDD and 3 SSD slots available in my case. With my current system I am using only about 1.5TB of total space across all of my drives about 500GB of games and 1TB of movies and pictures. I will not be doing a lot of data transfers back and forth from the drives mainly just playing games on the VMs and offloading pictures and videos from my cameras. I realize that I may not need NAS to begin with but I would like to get into it as a sort of learning experience. I have the following list of drives to work with: 1 x 8TB HDD 1 x 6TB HDD 1 X 2TB HDD 2 x 1TB HDD 2 x 800GB SSD 1 x 256GB SSD 1 x 120GB SSD 1 x 60GB SSD My thoughts are to set it up as follows: 8TB HDD-parity 6TB HDD-storage 2x800GB SSDs- one for each VM 256GB SSD- cache I also have a list of questions 1. Can the parity drive me equal in size to the storage drive or must it be larger? If so, can I create a partition on the storage drive to make it appear smaller than the parity drive? 2. If I place a file in storage such as a game can it be played by both VMs at the same time?

I am in the process of setting up a new system with two VMs I am wondering how large of a SSD I should use for cache and cache pool? Should I make the two 800GB SSD's the cache and cache pool or the two 256GB drives? Currently I have the following hard drives One 2TB HDD for parity device Three 1TB HDDs for storage Two 800GB SSD's Two 256GB SSD's One 120GB SSD

My complete list of items I am working with: MOBO- X399 Aorus Gaming 7 RAM- 32GB DDR4 3200 CPU- X1950 GPUs- 1 GTX 1070, 1 GTX 980, 1 GeForce 240 Storage- One 8GB USB drive with unraid OS New 4TB HDD Two 256GB SSDS with windows 10 pro (1 from my old PC and the other from my GF's) One 1TB HDD from my old computer with all of my files on it and no operating system One 2TB HDD from my girlfriends computer with all of her files and no operating system 4 monitors, 2 keyboard, 2 mice. Aside from the two VMs my GF and I will be using daily, I would eventually like to create a 3rd VM attached to my downstiars TV via KVM extender through CAT6. I am not sure if this is the sort of info you are looking for or not. If I am not telling you something need to know it's only because I either don't know or I'm trying not to bog you down with info.

My goal is to turn my current desktop into basically two desktops. I would like to hit the power button and two copies of Win 10 load up on two separate computer screens. Each one being controlled by its own mouse and keyboard. I would very much like to accomplish this without losing any of the data stored on my hard drives. If this is not possible that is ok too. Probably where I should have started to begin with I suppose. Sorry about that.

Maybe I should start with what I have. One 8GB USB drive with unraid OS New 4TB HDD Two 256GB SSDS with windows 10 pro (1 from my old PC and the other from my GF's) One 1TB HDD from my old computer with all of my files on it and no operating system One 2TB HDD from my girlfriends computer with all of her files and no operating system *If I need to purchase another SSD for a cache I will* What method would allow me to format the least of my current hard drives?

Ouch! Ok, thank you everyone for all of the help. I will attempt to set this thing up tonight!

I think I am following what you're saying. So if I purchase a new HDD for my parity disk and and two SSD's for my cache I can boot off my old hard drives as unassigned devices after they have been mounted to the new HDD parity disk. Is this correct?

I figured that I would need to reformat if I planed on having parity. Do I have to have parity? And if I were to go the Unassigned route would I not be able to boot from these drives? I am very new to this whole thing.

I recently sold my computer along with my GF's with the hope of purchasing one new computer to do the job of both old computers. I just received the parts for the new computer last night and finished putting it together. I removed our hard drives from our old computers before selling them and would like to know if it is possible to keep the data on the two drives when using Limetech?