So what is the preferred use of an unassigned drive and how does it benefit over adding a drive on the array? I have 5 out of 6 drives installed so was curious where to put the last drive already have 2 ssd's in the cache

You mention SSD is your 6th drive an SSD too?  If so you could pass through the whole drive to a VM if you plan on running a VM.  Also you don't have to have VT-d to pass a drive to a VM.  That's what I did with my MB SSD on my living room server.  I just switched the Primary vDisk Location to be equal to the full path and name of my MB SSD: "/dev/disk/by-id/ata-M4-CT128M4SSD3_00000000xxxxxxxxxxxx"

 

If it isn't an SSD then I have another question.  Why do you not have it in your array?  Is it not the same size as the rest of your drives for instance?

Edited September 9, 20178 yr by BobPhoenix

10 hours ago, BobPhoenix said:

You mention SSD is your 6th drive an SSD too?  If so you could pass through the whole drive to a VM if you plan on running a VM.  Also you don't have to have VT-d to pass a drive to a VM.  That's what I did with my MB SSD on my living room server.  I just switched the Primary vDisk Location to be equal to the full path and name of my MB SSD: "/dev/disk/by-id/ata-M4-CT128M4SSD3_00000000xxxxxxxxxxxx"

 

If it isn't an SSD then I have another question.  Why do you not have it in your array?  Is it not the same size as the rest of your drives for instance?

Sorry about that probably worded that wrong I have 5 drives in my system and I have the ability to add 1 more  so I was wondering what the benefits were to a drive that was unassigned over placing another in the array.

Edited September 9, 20178 yr by mrbilky

An Unassigned drive isn't part of the array, therefore it isn't protected by parity.  That typically limits what you would do with one.  The most common use cases for Unassigned drives are temporary - say, mount a drive to copy data in or out of the array.  As BobPhoenix mentions, a common use case for a permanently mounted Unassigned device has to do with passing it into a VM or running a VM on it due to the write performance advantage a single drive over the array.

3 hours ago, tdallen said:

An Unassigned drive isn't part of the array, therefore it isn't protected by parity.  That typically limits what you would do with one.  The most common use cases for Unassigned drives are temporary - say, mount a drive to copy data in or out of the array.  As BobPhoenix mentions, a common use case for a permanently mounted Unassigned device has to do with passing it into a VM or running a VM on it due to the write performance advantage a single drive over the array.

Got it, thanks for the info I found space invaders youtube channel and have been watching them they are pretty informative, thanks again!