November 27, 20196 yr So I've decided to stick with UnRAID and picked up a Pro license. My "array" consist of 7 4TB drives (2 for parity) with a 512GB cache SSD. I picked up 2 12TB drives and would like to add them. My understanding is my parity drives have to both be as big as the largest drive in the array. So in order to use 1 of the 12TB drives for data I will have to go down to 1 drive for parity. What is the best way to do this or can I mix my parity drives as long as one of them matches the largest drive in the array? Does UnRAID let you build volumes like FlexRAID did? With FlexRAID you could take 3 4tb drives and make a 12tb volume to use in the array.
November 27, 20196 yr Community Expert Both parity drives need to be the same size or larger than any data drive, so if you have two parity devices would need to upgrade both to 12TB first, only after could you starting adding 12TB drives for data.
November 27, 20196 yr Community Expert 6 hours ago, Juise99 said: Does UnRAID let you build volumes like FlexRAID did? With FlexRAID you could take 3 4tb drives and make a 12tb volume to use in the array. This question has a bit of a double answer for Unraid. Physically, you can not combine three 4TB drives to make a single 12TB volume. Logically, you already have that capability because the User Shares essentially do exactly that. You have a problem with how to use the two new 12TB drives. Basically, you have two options: 1-- Use both 12TB drives as parity drives and use the two current 4TB parity drives as data drives. This will gain you an extra 8TB of additional storage. 2-- Drop to single parity and use a 12TB drive as a data drive and both of the old 4TB drives as data drives. This gains you an extra 20TB of data storage. With only seven/nine drives in the system, single parity is a very viable option. See here for more details: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/50504-dual-or-single-parity-its-your-choice/ As you will read there are a lot more ways to lose data than from hard drive failures with dual parity and many of those are more likely than a data loss from a series of hard disk failures! Dual parity has a real economic cost and you must weigh that cost against your risk tolerance. But realize that if you feel that you must have dual parity because you are risk adverse, you had better have a secure off-site backup of your irreplaceable data to cover the 'risks' (fire, theft, flooding, lightning, wind, etc.) to your physical server.
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