Which Raid Flavour to Use?

[TheProSharkGamer]

I'm setting up a basic NAS using an old core 2 duo PC, to replace an synology NAS that's prone to crashing. So far I've installed openmediavault on it, and tested that it's working just with some usb storage. I've got several hard drives of different sizes, including the 2tb drive from my old nas and a 640gb WD drive. Which raid configuration should I use to combine these capacities?

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, TheProSharkGamer said:

I'm setting up a basic NAS using an old core 2 duo PC, to replace an synology NAS that's prone to crashing. So far I've installed openmediavault on it, and tested that it's working just with some usb storage. I've got several hard drives of different sizes, including the 2tb drive from my old nas and a 640gb WD drive. Which raid configuration should I use to combine these capacities?

Depends on the filesystem you plan to use. As far as I know, Btrfs is the only one that can actually make full use of differently-sized drives in a RAID-configuration. All the other ones I know of, including ZFS, can only use as much as the smallest drive in the RAID. Besides which, even with Btrfs, this only applies to RAID5 or RAID6, as far as I know.

 

Then there's the issue that OMV doesn't have official support for Btrfs, so you'd have to manually setup and maintain a Btrfs RAID from the command-line.

[Eigenvektor]

If the redundancy of raid isn't a strict requirement and you just want to combine their capacity into one logical drive, LVM might be a solution: https://opensource.com/business/16/9/linux-users-guide-lvm