Questions regarding adding drives after initial install and parity drives

[Teeman]

 

After reading, I am a bit disappointed that I can't have two separate arrays/pools with their own parity drives.

 

I have four brand new 18 TB clean drives and four old drives with data on them. Two of them being 14 TB and two of them being 10 TB

 

My original plan was to use the four new drives with one parity,  in one array. Then I would copy the data from the older NTFS drives onto that new array. Then I would add a second array with one of the 14TBs as parity.

 

Since I won't be able to do this, how much of an issue will it be to add the old drives to the array later?

 

Will the parity work more or less the same if I have one 18 TB and one 14 TB as parity. Will it still have the same amount of parity as it would if there would two separate arrays? It would be nice if this could allow for two drives to die and still have no data loss.

 

And now after typing this, I think I would prefer having the parity protect all drives anyway.

 

Thanks.

 

Edit: One extra question I have is... Can I leave the NTFS formatted drives in the computer when installing UNRAID and will it clearly allow to me to select only the new drives to add to the array initially? I don't want to accidentally overwrite the old NTFS drives before copying the data off of them. I have backups, but I like having at least 2 copies of every file.

 

Edited April 28 by Teeman
one more question

[itimpi]

You can add parity drives and extra data drives at any time (up to your licence limit).    The only rule is that no data drive can be larger than the smallest parity drive.

 

The number of parity drives determines how many simultaneous drive failures you can handle.

 

Unraid will NOT protect you against accidentally adding the old NTFS formatted drives to the array.   However if you install the Unassigned Devices plugin you will be able to mount them outside the array.   This should both stop you accidentally adding them to the array and also make it easier to copy their data onto the array once you have set it up.

 

Note that it is intended in the future you can have multiple 'Unraid' type arrays but this is still quite a way off so not something that can be used in the short term.