November 3, 20241 yr Hello everyone, I hope you're all doing well. I'm currently using UNRAID 7 and have a couple of questions regarding my storage configuration. 1. Is there a way to exclude specific drives from being protected by the parity disk within a parity array? 2. Alternatively, can I set up a parity array alongside another array that is not protected by parity at all? I would appreciate any insights, methods, or workarounds you might have for either of these scenarios. Thank you in advance for your help!
November 3, 20241 yr Community Expert 1 hour ago, LeopoldHu said: Hello everyone, I hope you're all doing well. I'm currently using UNRAID 7 and have a couple of questions regarding my storage configuration. 1. Is there a way to exclude specific drives from being protected by the parity disk within a parity array? 2. Alternatively, can I set up a parity array alongside another array that is not protected by parity at all? I would appreciate any insights, methods, or workarounds you might have for either of these scenarios. Thank you in advance for your help! At the moment the answer to both questions is no, although when Unraid v7 finally supports multiple Unraid type arrays it will be possible to do 2. The closest you could currently get is to have the Unraid array without parity and have redundant pools, Why are you interested in 1? If you explain why you think you need this we might be able to suggest the best way to proceed.
November 4, 20241 yr Author 18 hours ago, itimpi said: At the moment the answer to both questions is no, although when Unraid v7 finally supports multiple Unraid type arrays it will be possible to do 2. The closest you could currently get is to have the Unraid array without parity and have redundant pools, Why are you interested in 1? If you explain why you think you need this we might be able to suggest the best way to proceed. Thanks for you reply. I have set up an array with a parity disk to store my important data. However, I also have several old, mismatched hard drives that I’ve retired from various computers. These drives aren’t very reliable, and I’d like to use them for storing non-critical downloads and temporary files. Therefore, I don’t want these drives to be included in the parity protection. Additionally, I prefer not to convert my existing parity array to a ZFS Pool because I want the flexibility to add disks in the future. I appreciate any suggestions or workarounds you might have for achieving this setup. Thank you! Edited November 4, 20241 yr by LeopoldHu
November 4, 20241 yr Community Expert Solution 9 hours ago, LeopoldHu said: have set up an array with a parity disk to store my important data. However, I also have several old, mismatched hard drives that I’ve retired from various computers. These drives aren’t very reliable, and I’d like to use them for storing non-critical downloads and temporary files. Therefore, I don’t want these drives to be included in the parity protection. The only sensible way I see for these to be used in the current releases would be to use them as Unassigned Devices. However that does have the disadvantage that they cannot be part of any User Shares. Note that if you want to set up a pool and be able to easily add disks in the future then you could use BTRFS for this. That format allows adding drives at any time and of mismatched sizes. However a possible downside is it may not be as good at recovering from drive issues as ZFS of XFS. As was mentioned eventually Unraid 7 should support your desired Use Case but I would think that is still some way off - I would guess at it being the Unraid 7.1 release although I have no inside information around tis.
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