Hey All,

So originally i had 2x 4tb drives and a SSD for cache, i had an array with the 2x4TBs with 1 setup as parity and the other as data while i waited for my drive caddies to ship from china, the caddies have finally arrived installed them and 2 new 4TB drives, I checked the drives space, formatted and now they are in the Array and thats all good but my question is all the parity data for the single 4TB is in the parity drive still is there a way to span it across the disks on the array? or are drives data-only in this instance? Im sorry if this is a newbie question im just not 100% sure and want to make sure my data is as safe as possible. My parity and the original 4TB are basically full at this point and the two new drives are empty bar 30gb of usage. can anyone explain this to me? thanks!

 

 

Edited July 2, 20206 yr by RookieKiwi

The parity drive is the only one that holds parity information.    The parity is calculated by performing the appropriate calculations across all data drives so you now have the one parity drive protecting your 3 data drives against any one of them failing.

16 minutes ago, itimpi said:

The parity drive is the only one that holds parity information.    The parity is calculated by performing the appropriate calculations across all data drives so you now have the one parity drive protecting your 3 data drives against any one of them failing.

Okay i guess i was assuming it was like a traditional raid where data was also across the data drives, so my 1:4 parity ratio is all good then i can just start filling the other drives without problems?

You might want read this part of the documentation to get a better idea of how UnRAID parity works.

Unraid (with a single parity drive) is somewhat akin to RAID-4 but without the striping of the data.  Pros and cons for it's approach, but IMO the pros far exceed the cons.

Hey im happy with that, Thanks for the answers guys really appreciate it