UnRaid Parity and storage size calculation

[waterfallbay]

Hi i am new to the unraid community.

 

I have seen their were an unRaid size calculator before but seems it is not working now. I have a simple question. If I am now having a 8 bays setup with 8 x 8T drives, is that i have to use one 8T drive as parity to support the other 7 drives? that means i will have 56T of available storage? Is this correct?

 

What if i have a 16 bays setup? do i also only need 1 drive as the parity drive? This sounds unreal to me as I dont undestand why the same size of parity drive can support larger size of actual storage. How could unraid achieve this?

 

Thank you and wish you all have a great day!

[itimpi]

You are correct in that in the main Unraid array all the available space on none-parity drives is available.

 

As to how parity works regardless of the number of drives in the array you might find this part of the online documentation clarifies things?   It also might make it clearer why as the number of drives goes up you may be more inclined to have a second parity drive to protect against 2 simultaneous drive failures.