I am looking for some assistance trying to figure out the best way to setup my drives. My plan is to have two windows VM's and as much storage as possible available while only utilizing  the 2 HDD and 3 SSD slots available in my case. With my current system I am using only about 1.5TB of total space across all of my drives about 500GB of games and 1TB of movies and pictures. I will not be doing a lot of data transfers back and forth from the drives mainly just playing games on the VMs and offloading pictures and videos from my cameras. I realize that I may not need NAS to begin with but I would like to get into it as a sort of learning experience. 

I have the following list of drives to work with:

 

1 x 8TB HDD

1 x 6TB HDD

1 X 2TB HDD

2 x 1TB HDD

 

2 x 800GB SSD

1 x 256GB SSD

1 x 120GB SSD

1 x 60GB SSD

 

My thoughts are to set it up as follows:

8TB HDD-parity 

6TB HDD-storage

2x800GB SSDs- one for each VM

256GB SSD- cache

 

I  also have a list of questions

1. Can the parity drive me equal in size to the storage drive or must it be larger? If so, can I create a partition on the storage drive to make it appear smaller than the parity drive?

2. If I place a file in storage such as a game can it be played by both VMs at the same time? 

 

Regarding your questions:

1. The parity drive cannot be smaller than any data drive in the array (although it can be the same size).    Also Unraid always partitions array and parity drives with a single partition covering the whole drive.
2. if a file is placed on a network share then it can be made visible to multiple VMs at the same time (just like with physical PCs).   It will depend on the game being happy to play with files on a network share.  If the game demands the file(s) be seen as a local drive then they cannot be shared.

1 hour ago, itimpi said:

If the game demands the file(s) be seen as a local drive then they cannot be shared.

Also if an application has a file open for writing, another application (or another instance of that same game for example) probably won't be able to open it.

That helped me make some decision as to how I will configure my storage. Thank you both!