I am building a new unraid server.  I have never understood the point of the super slow parity array and I was thinking of just using one disk for unraid and another for a simple rsync backup.  Is the array really better in some way?  Like how would you know if a disk died if it is in the array?  How would you know if it was the parity disk or not?  What would you need to do?  You still need backups even with a parity disk so I don't see what it buys you.  Why not use a regular mirror or raid instead?

 

In my existing unraid server the disks that are dying are the cache.  As far as I know the array is fine although the parity check finds at least one error every time.  There needs to be a better way to move the cache onto new disks.  The best thing I could come up with was to buy another server and migrate to it long enough to rebuild cache on the old server.  I can't even copy VMs off the cache because the disks are in such bad shape.  Luckily I was able to save most docker container configs.

So if I want to mirror instead of parity how do I do it?  I don't see a way to combine the 2 disks in the array.

29 minutes ago, uek2wooF said:

So if I want to mirror instead of parity how do I do it?  I don't see a way to combine the 2 disks in the array.

If you are using the 7 series beta, you simply define another pool with the 2 disks and select RAID1 either BTRFS or ZFS.

If you are still on the 6.x release, the array is still necessary, but you can assign any old drive, even a USB, to disk1 and then define all the different pools with whatever RAID levels you want.