November 11, 20205 yr Hey Getting ready to build after christmas, i have 15x6tb SAS drives, im planning to run 11xDrives, 2xParity & 2 Cold Spares. These will run off two HBA cards. Couple of questions Parity: Do the Parity Drive sizes need to match and can they be upgraded down the line, im planning to start with 2x 6tb Parity drives, i have gotten these drives for free but later after the build is finished when im spending my own money i plan to buy larger drives. Its my understanding that the size of the drive i am using is limited by the parity drive, so if i have a 6tb parity drive the largest drive i can add is another 6tb drive. If i set this all up later down the road can i buy a 12tb drive and replace one parity drive and then the following month buy another 12tb parity drive. Now in my head going forward i can buy and add 12tb drives alongside my 6tb drives and slowly over time increase space in this method? HBA Cards: I got a buunch of Dell Perc H310s RAID controllers which i have flashed to IT Mode and tested, they all work but for this build i'll only need two. If a HBA controller were to fail for whatever reason can i simply pull the card and swap it out and power the box back up, does UNRAID uniquly ID the hardware or will it care if the cards are swaped Networking: I also got a dual port 10gb NIC, im not 10gb networking at home yet but down the line does UNRAID support the bonding of network ports or iSCSI to increase throuput? Sorry for all the questions but id rather know now then have to find out later Cheers
November 12, 20205 yr 3 hours ago, Mav359 said: Do the Parity Drive sizes need to match No. The only restriction is that no data drive can be larger than either parity drive, as you said. For planning purposes, I tend to only add space when the free space in the array drops below the size of the largest data drive. There is no point in keeping drives in the array unused, each spindle adds power consumption and a point of failure. One of the strongest points of Unraid is the ability to seamlessly expand the parity array, so use that to your advantage. Unless you have 60TB of data queued up to populate the array, I wouldn't set up with all 11 of those data drives at first. Only put in enough drives for your initial data load with one additional drive. As long as the controllers are in IT mode you can move drives around between different controllers and Unraid will find them with no issue. Unraid supports several bonding schemes for network, keep in mind the switch must also support the scheme you choose. No native iSCSI, user plugin available, but it's only a month or two old, so rather untested right now. SAS drives do not consistently support spin down, this is also being tested with a community based plugin, but best advice at the moment is disable spin down on full SAS drives. SATA drives on SAS controllers spin down fine.
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