November 11, 201411 yr I have spent hours trying to figure out how much storage I will have after I build an unRAID server. I cannot find anything that explains this, I feel like I'm missing something. I have a 4TB drive and several 2TB drives.
November 11, 201411 yr Basically you will loose the storage of your largest drive. if you have a 4tb HD and a 2TB HD you will only have 2TB, but every hard drive you add after that is added to your pool, so if you add 2 more 2TB drives you are up to 6TB of storage.
November 11, 201411 yr It's very simple: The parity drive has to be >= the size of any other drive in the array. You don't really "lose" the space on the parity drive ... you're simply allocating that space to provide fault tolerance. The storage capacity of the array will be the sum of all other drives in the array. So if you had a 4TB parity drive, and 5 2TB drives, you'd have 10TB of storage.
November 11, 201411 yr Author What happens if I add the 4TB dtive to the server last? Right now it has 3.5TB of data on it and I need to be able to copy it to the unRAID server before I can install it in the server.
November 11, 201411 yr It doesn't matter what order you add your hard drives. Your Parity Drive needs to be equal to or larger than the biggest hard drive that will be used to contain your data.
November 11, 201411 yr You can simply configure your server without a parity drive; then copy all the data from the 4TB drive you want to use as parity to the server; and THEN install the 4TB unit as a parity drive. In fact, the copies will be much faster this way, since without a parity drive write speeds are much faster -- limited only by your network speed and the actual disk write speeds. With a parity drive they will be significantly slower. However, as I assume you're aware, what you're suggesting means you will not have any backups of your data, since you plan to wipe the source (the 4TB drive) after you've copied it all to the array. Remember that UnRAID is NOT a substitute for good backups ... something to consider if the data you plan to store on it is important to you.
November 11, 201411 yr Author This is going to be a media server so all the content can be reacquired, it would be a hassle but not a serious problem. So I should put in the 2TB drives and run with no parity until I put the 4TB drive in?
November 11, 201411 yr Unless you want to buy a new 4TB drive, running without parity while you load your data is probably your best option.
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