Questionable drives in unraid?

[Schteeben]

Hi all,

 

I'm running R Studio Recovery right now to get some data back from my RAID 5 NAS when 2 of my drives failed at the same time. So, to end this data recovery RAID nonsense I've decided to switch to unraid.

 

My question is this - I have a whole bunch of disks (maybe 12 or so) of varying brands and qualities and age laying about in the house. Would it be acceptable to have 2 brand new WD 4TB Red as parity drives and the remaining drives of questionable reliability as data drives? 

 

I'm still very new to unraid so please bear with my questions... 

 

Thanks

S

Edited February 23, 2020 by Schteeben
Better title

[JorgeB]

43 minutes ago, Schteeben said:

Would it be acceptable to have 2 brand new WD 4TB Red as parity drives and the remaining drives of questionable reliability as data drives? 

Not a good idea, when a disk fails Unraid needs to successfully read all the other drives to rebuild it (or all other but one with dual parity), though it also depends what you mean by questionable, any drive that fails the extended SMART test shouldn't be used, drives with a few reallocated sectors or other less serious SMART issues might be used, depending on your tolerance for failure.

[Schteeben]

22 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Not a good idea, when a disk fails Unraid needs to successfully read all the other drives to rebuild it (or all other but one with dual parity), though it also depends what you mean by questionable, any drive that fails the extended SMART test shouldn't be used, drives with a few reallocated sectors or other less serious SMART issues might be used, depending on your tolerance for failure.

That makes sense. I might do a bunch of tests like extended SMART and full disk low level format before throwing them into the server. 

 

Does it make sense to use unraid for archiving storage? Or should I just have a bunch of drives as cold storage offline?

[JorgeB]

1 hour ago, Schteeben said:

Does it make sense to use unraid for archiving storage?

That's one of the main use cases.

[Schteeben]

32 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

That's one of the main use cases.

Thanks. I didn't use my RAID for long term archival storage because I didn't want the drives to spin constantly and increasing the risk of them failing due to wear.

 

I understand that unraid only spins up the disks that contains the data, is it smart enough to group a bunch of very infrequently used data into a few drives that almost never spin up? Or do I have to do that manually somehow?

[JorgeB]

You can control that first by choosing which disks can that share use, and then bt allocation method and split level, but there's no "smart" grouping.

[Schteeben]

9 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

You can control that first by choosing which disks can that share use, and then bt allocation method and split level, but there's no "smart" grouping.

Amazing. Thanks!