Went slightly overkill on HDDs. What should I do with the empty ones until I need them?


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The (admittedly long) title says it all. 

 

When I put together my unRAID build last year I bought 4x3TB disks because I got a really good price on sale then added another 3TB disk I had on my desktop computer since the idea was to not store anything there and just use the NAS. So that leaves me with this... 

 

image.png.09fcff13366c39ae53dd5dec9818f25c.png

 

 

This might be a dumb question but... what's are the best practices/recommended procedure when dealing with extra space that I don't foresee filling up immediately?. I can move stuff from the third disk to the first and second and that would leave me with 2 half-filled disks and 2 empty ones. I'm already past the 3TB mark so I need to disks but the other two are mostly empty. 

 

Should I remove them from the array? Unplug them altogether until I need them? Leave them as-is? If I remove them from the array, do I need to rebuild parity? All the drives are encrypted too...would I need to take special precautions because of that?. 

 

The disks spend most of the day spun-down. Disk #4 only spins up when I reboot the server or parity check kicks in. 

 

Thanks!. 

Edited by Laucien
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Sit down and analyze your backup strategy.

 

1) Where do you store backups of the files that you keep on the unRAID machine?

 

2) Where do you store backups of the files you have on other machines?

 

Quite soon you might realize you don't have too much free disk space anymore :)

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