Building home NAS with various old drives

[DavidZweistein]

Hey guys,

Ive been looking around the internet to get an idea about whether I can use my existing collection of various hdds (which currently lay around freely with all my data backed up to it) to build a home nas from them. I understand that eg freenas is going to take my smallest drive (1TB) and use all others only to that size. So I wonder whether there is another way to use my 1*1tb, 1*1.5tb, 2*2tb and 1*3tb drives (btw its a mix of seagate barracuda, wd blue and random samsung) in my old pc to use as nas, preferably without ending up with only 5* "1" tb drives showing up in the nas os, or at least something along the lines of 1 pool of 5*1tb for redundant raidlike backups and the rest in 0.5+1+1+2tb another pool for just dumping not as important data to without redundancy. But I'm generally open to any idea which wont cost me lots.

 

Thx!

[Windows7ge]

The only solution I know of that will work with the is UnRAID but I'm sure there are less popular free alternatives out there.

[Electronics Wizardy]

btrfs can do this.

 

Snapraid and mergerfs can do this.

 

storgae spaces on windows can do this.

[Net Runner]

If I remember it correctly you can use different drive sizes within the same storage pool with ZFS. I would recommend installing FreeNAS and giving ZFS a try.