August 18, 20241 yr Good afternoon. I have moved my music collection to an array share called "music". My concern is, by the looks of how the music is being distributed across my 3 array disks, if I loose disk 1 or disk 2 I am going to lose half my music files, therefore I ask what is the point of the Parity drive, as I am not going to be able to recover full files stored on disk 1 or disk 2, if a disk fails? Am I being thick? I've historically used in the past and my brain use to RAID5. I just can't get my head around how would UNRAID work in this instance and the relationship with the dedicated Parity disk? Any help would be very much appreciated, thank you in advance.
August 18, 20241 yr 5 minutes ago, Vinney said: if I loose disk 1 or disk 2 I am going to lose half my music files, Why do you think that? Parity will protect against one failed disk, any disk.
August 18, 20241 yr Solution The great thing about the way Unraid does parity is that since it uses 1 (like RAID 5) or 2 (like RAID 6 where you can lose 2 disks) dedicated disks for parity you still get the same "lose any disk" protection (as JorgeB stated) but because there is no parity or data striping involved all of your data disks are just regular disks formatted with XFS. This means that if you took one of your data disks and put it in another Linux system (or any system capable of reading XFS) then you could read it just fine. If you were to loose more than one disk in a RAID 5 setup you would lose all of your data. In Unraid since the data disks are just normally formatted disks you would still be able to read any disk that did not fail. Another advantage to not striping the data is that when you read the array you only need to spin up the disk that contains the files you are reading and not every disk like you would with RAID 5. The downside is that you don't get the throughput of reading from all of your disks at the same time like you do in RAID 5. For me this is a perfectly acceptable trade-off because I don't need super high throughput for my use case (meda server). I hope this helps.
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