Increasing dual parity size

[sonofdbn]

I'm on 6.9.2 and have 8 disk in the array (almost all 8TB) and two parity disks (both 8TB). Given case size, motherboard, HBA card, SSD cache and one SSD unassigned device, I'm maxed out as far as storage devices are concerned. My longer term goal is to increase capacity by increasing the standard disk size to whatever the new sweet spot is - maybe 14TB? So the problem is that first I need to buy 2 14 TB drives to replace the parity drives, and then a third 14 TB drive for data before I get any increased storage capacity.

 

I had a similar problem moving from 4TB to 8TB, so it's not a new thing, and given the long rebuild times with larger disk sizes, I do feel that dual parity is needed. In reality, the important things are backed up, so it's not a mission critical issue, but it would just be a huge pain to rebuild from scratch.

 

Is there any alternative? Or is there an Unraid roadmap of where parity is going? (Apologies for not keeping up on this.) It seems that with ever-increasing hdd sizes but minimal improvement in r/w speeds, the rebuild times will just get MUCH longer and dual parity becomes even more important.

[JorgeB]

4 hours ago, sonofdbn said:

It seems that with ever-increasing hdd sizes but minimal improvement in r/w speeds, the rebuild times will just get MUCH longer

Unraid can't do anything about that, it's limited by the disks speed, compare for example 8 and 16TB disks, capacity doubled but max speed went from around 225MB/s to 275MB/s for the fastest models.