So I recently found out that I have sh*t my leg… I was about to set up unraid but just before dipping my toes I was told that the parity drive needs to be the same or larger in size, really wish I had done more thorough reseach before recently buying that 10TB HDD hehe…
You can set this sort of “redundancy with different-size drives without wasting a bunch of space” thing up at the block device level – I understand that Synology’s “Hybrid RAID” is a Linux system doing that. But you’ve got to be careful doing that; configure it wrong and you won’t have redundancy.
I don’t know, somewhat-surprisingly, of a software package that aims to manage a collection of disks to do this configuration at a high level, slicing up a collection of drives into smaller block devices and adding and removing disks and migrating data and such while providing guarantees that data has at least N drive redundancy.
That being said, even in such a configuration, you can only do so much. If you have one drive that’s 10TB and the rest of all your drives intended for redundant storage sum to 3TB – which is what you have – you can’t have a configuration that can handle failure of your 10TB drive and can store more than 3TB of data with redundancy, no matter how you slice and dice things. You’re going to have to waste 7TB of space or store data without redundancy.
What’s best to do is probably going to depend on how much you want to spend.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
You can set this sort of “redundancy with different-size drives without wasting a bunch of space” thing up at the block device level – I understand that Synology’s “Hybrid RAID” is a Linux system doing that. But you’ve got to be careful doing that; configure it wrong and you won’t have redundancy.
I don’t know, somewhat-surprisingly, of a software package that aims to manage a collection of disks to do this configuration at a high level, slicing up a collection of drives into smaller block devices and adding and removing disks and migrating data and such while providing guarantees that data has at least N drive redundancy.
That being said, even in such a configuration, you can only do so much. If you have one drive that’s 10TB and the rest of all your drives intended for redundant storage sum to 3TB – which is what you have – you can’t have a configuration that can handle failure of your 10TB drive and can store more than 3TB of data with redundancy, no matter how you slice and dice things. You’re going to have to waste 7TB of space or store data without redundancy.
What’s best to do is probably going to depend on how much you want to spend.