October 2, 201312 yr Hi, sorry if this has already been addressed, but: I have not used unRAID yet, but I plan on putting it on an HP N54L Microserver with four 3TB drives. At some point in the future I would probably want to add a fifth drive that would be 4TB. According to the wiki, I would need to make the new 4TB drive the parity drive. My question is, how much useable space would that give me? I'm assuming 12TB? Would there be any advantage to having an extra 1TB on the new parity drive, or would it be more economical to just get another 3TB drive instead?
October 2, 201312 yr Author Never mind, I found the Capacity Calculator. Looks like having the parity drive be larger than the others doesn't make any difference to useable space. Thanks!
October 2, 201312 yr As you've already figured out, the parity drive has no impact on useable space -- only on how large your drives can be. However, if you want to eventually add some 4TB data drives, it's advantageous to buy a 4TB parity drive now, so you don't have to replace your parity drive when you want to add larger drives later. I'd also consider just using 4TB drives now -- you'll get the same 12TB with 3 4TB drives that you would with 4 3TB drives, so the cost won't be much difference ... and you'll be using less power and have an extra drive slot for adding another drive in the future. Unless, of course, you already have the 3TB drives.
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