Hi all. This may be a stupid question but here we go anyway. I have 2 Unraid servers setup. My first has 22x 8TB drives and 1 parity. My second has no parity and currently has 12 drives of varying sizes from 12TB to 4TB. I'm trying to maximize the amount of space allocated and have noticed the server with Parity starts each new drive added with more space used than the server with no parity. I'm guessing this is all parity information. If I recall correctly, if you have no parity and a drives dies, you only lose the data on that one drive and the data on the others remains unaffected. If both these assumptions are correct, I'm OK with losing a drive and the data if it happens to fail, however my question is: If I remove the parity drive from the server, will I gain that space back on the existing drives after I "New Config" or is that space lost forever unless I wiped and rebuilt?

 

Thanks for your help!

There is nothing relating to parity on the data drives so removing the parity drive will have no effect on them.

 

Much more likely the difference is due to the version of Unraid used to format the drives.   Newer Unraid releases use a later XFS version which has a larger overhead when formatting a drive.

Got it, appreciate the answer! Is it correct that if one drive fails that other drives are unaffected? If that's true a least I can gain another 8TB at the risk of no data recovery of a failed drive.

Just now, Zachios said:

Is it correct that if one drive fails that other drives are unaffected?

Yep. Each drive in the main array is separate.

 

Pools can be defined differently, so that's not necessarily applicable to pools.

Just now, Zachios said:

Is it correct that if one drive fails that other drives are unaffected? If that's true a least I can gain another 8TB at the risk of no data recovery of a failed drive

Yes.  
 

In Unraid each array disk is a free-standing file system independent of any other drives in the array.

Thanks so much for the quick replies!