Parity drive, Thinking ahead

[chris_netsmart]

I am thinking head here and I would like some advice.

 

at the moment I have one 4TB Parity Hard drive with 4 x 4TB Hard Drives in a RAID giving me a total of 16TB of storage.

but as time go's on, I will have to think about expanding my storage again, within the next 6 mouths. so I am thinking the following

 

add a fifth  4TB hard drive to expand my storage to 20TB, and at the same time I will also have to look at added a second parity drive. of 4TB or

purchase a 8TB drive for my parity and re-use my current parity drive as my fifth.

 

[hitman2158]

55 minutes ago, chris_netsmart said:

purchase a 8TB drive for my parity and re-use my current parity drive as my fifth

That´s what I would do.

 

The advantage is (thinking ahead) the ability to replace your 4TB drives with bigger ones in the future.

[ashman70]

I agree, purchase the largest parity drive your budget will allow, maybe even 10TB, then you are not limited by 4TB and can add anything from 4TB all the way up to 10TB.

[chris_netsmart]

thanks,  if I go to the 8TB or 10TB then what would you recommend my MAX size RAID should I have,

[itimpi]

25 minutes ago, chris_netsmart said:

thanks,  if I go to the 8TB or 10TB then what would you recommend my MAX size RAID should I have,

Many people have run arrays of 20 drives or more with single parity.    However my personal feeling is that when one gets above about 6-8 data drives one should be thinking of going dual parity.   In the end, though, t all depends on what you think is the risk and how good your backup strategy is.    If you have good backups then going with single parity (or even no parity) are perfectly viable solutions.

 

Bear in mind that any critical data should ALWAYS be backed up outside the array.   You can decide what counts as critical.