I'm assuming the parity works at the block level so doesn't care about what is actually on each disk?  To that end, I could reformat one of my blank XFS disks to btrfs?

 

Thanks,

Yes. You can mix and match at will.

Well that's very nice.  I'm thinking BTRFS would be more suited to my Lightroom catalogues and such which are lots of small files.  Do you have any idea how I do the reformat?  Logically I should be able to format it live (or perhaps with the array stopped) and make the parity see those changes realtime, but I'm betting I'll have to do a newconfig with the newly formatted drive included? (It's existing currently as XFS, but with no data on it).

Edited July 14, 20196 yr by Marshalleq
Spelling Error

No - the format is done live.    The steps are:

• Stop the array
• Click on the drive on the Main tab and change the format to the desired one
• Start the array - the disk will now show as unmountable on the Main tab
• The option to format unmountable disks will now be available with the disk you have just changed being the only one mentioned.  Using this option will start the formatting process.
• When the format completes (should only take a few minutes) the disk will be mounted showing it has no files but is now in the desired format and ready for use.

Edited July 14, 20196 yr by itimpi

Well that's very nice too!  Thanks, I will give it a try.