Hello all,

 

I bought another 10TB drive and have a hard time deciding if I should use it to expand my storage or add a secondary parity drive.... suggestions?

My current configuration is

1 10TB Parity

2 10TB data

3 6TB data

1 3TB data

1 2TB data

1 1TB SSD cache drive

for a total of 43TB of storage with 25.1TB available

 

The array is mainly used for Plex, movies, tv shows etc, but I also have nextcloud running on it.

 

Thank you

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by Stefan Bredin

You might want to read this in your quest for information:  

 

 

If have 25TB available, why need expand it ? In fact, 2nd parity can change be data disk anytime.

Edited April 16, 20206 yr by Benson

18 minutes ago, Stefan Bredin said:

I bought another 10TB drive and have a hard time deciding if I should use it to expand my storage or add a secondary parity drive.... suggestions?

Several things to consider.

• Do you have backups of all your important data?
• How often do you open the case and mess around with cabling/drive swapping?
• How are your drive installed in the case? Drive cages/hot-swap bays, or individual power connectors for each drive?
• How old are the drives you are currently using?  Are any of them showing signs of approaching failure in SMART reports?
• How risk tolerant are you?

There is no one-size-fits-all recommendation for when you need a second parity disk although many start considering it at around 8+ data drives.  If you backup everything and you lose more data drives than your parity setup can protect, you don't worry too much because you can restore lost data.

 

Quite often, a failed drive is not really a failed drive.  Sometimes it is a cabling or power problem because you knocked a cable loose while messing around in the case.  If you have hotswap cages that is less likely to happen or at least is minimized.

 

Replacing several lower capacity drives with fewer larger capacity drives is also a good strategy.  It minimizes potential points of failure by reducing the number of disks in the system.  Perhaps you might consider replacing the 2, 3 and one of the 6 TB drives with the 10TB.  The net result is 1TB less storage but two fewer drives that could fail.  You seem to have plenty of available storage right now.  With 5 data drives (3 10TB and 2 6TB), single parity is plenty.

 

If you have other components on hand, you could possibly build a backup server with the spare drives.  As I swapped parts/drives out of the main server, I used them for a backup server for the really important data.  Yes, It's smaller capacity, but, I don't need to backup absolutely everything.

 

With 7 data drives, you are approaching the point of considering if you need extra parity protection, but, consider all of the above first.

Hoopster, the drives are in a 24bay hot swappable Supermicro chassi.

 

Thank you for the input