August 23, 2025Aug 23 Hi, I am very new to the whole Unraid/Linux world and need help in setting up my system.I have the following drives :2 x 8TB drives4 x 4TB drives1 x 6TB drives1 x 480GB SSD driveMy usage would generally be as a storage server for iso's etc and as a media server to stream video, TV series, Music and to hold my Ebook collection.I obviously want to have some redundency in there as I don't want to lose too much data if the server dies.I can potentially add a couple more 500GB drives and on a case upgrade potentially a further 3 x 4TB drives.What would be the best array/pool setup?I am currently preclearing all the existing drives and have a Nvidia Quadro card for transcoding.
August 23, 2025Aug 23 Community Expert No data drive can be larger than the smallest parity drive so you need to use at least 1 of the 8TB drive for parity which will protect against 1 drive failing. You can (optionally) use the second 8TB drive for parity if you want to allow for 2 drives failing at the same time. At that point add the remaking HDD as data drives. The usable space will be the sum of the data drives (less a small amount for file system overhead. You can later add additional data drives up to what your licence allows (your current drives require support for at least 8 drives). If you ever want to use data drives larger than 8TB you would have to upgrade your parity drives to match.The SSD is best used in a pool. This would then typically used for hosting docker containers and/or hosting VMs and/or acting as a write cache to the array data drivesIt is probably not worth adding the 500GB drives to the main array, although they could well be useful as pool drives if you want multiple pools.
August 23, 2025Aug 23 Community Expert Single parity should be fine for that many disks. One of the 8TB would be parity.The SSD would be cache, to be used for the "default" shares that support Dockers/VMs, and for caching array writes.20 minutes ago, krakatoa said:don't want to lose too much dataParity is not a substitute for backups. You must always have another copy of all important and irreplaceable data.
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