Drive Pool Software with Parity

[r.b]

Hi, I am trying to build a home media server.  I have several hdds (around 10) of varying capacities (from 500GB to 8TB).  I was originally planning on building an unraid server, but after 2 different sata controller cards not allowing access to the connected hdd, I decided to look at other options.  I just have 3 key features that I am looking for in a storage solution.  One, I want to pool the drives into 1 large drive with a single drive letter/address/etc.  Second, I would like to have some sort of parity drive for a single hdd failure.  And lastly, I do not want the individual files to be spanned across multiple drives, ie. if I did have a 2nd drive failure, only the data on that drive would be affected.

 

Unraid would have worked perfect for this, but I am done with messing around with a bunch of controller cards.  Other options I was considering were Storage Spaces (Windows 10), FreeNAS or TrueNAS, or openmediavault with snapraid.  I can not seem to find any information on any of these OSes that definitively state how each file is written (spanned or intact) across the drive pool.

 

Unraid is completely out, as I also was not impressed with their "support" for what would have been paid-for software.

 

Any suggestions?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Snapraid will have the most similar functionalty here. The others will all stripe files across multipel dries. But storage spaces and btrfs will both work well with mixed drive pools. And if > 1 drive fails at once, just restore backups

[r.b]

I started playing around with storage spaces. From what I could tell and research, it seems to be fairly solid and does not discriminate with what hardware is used with it.  It can also do a mirrored for more sensitive data redundancy.  I also played around with unplugging drives (to simulate a failure), adding and removing drives, swapping controller cards, and reinstalling the os to see if anything would cause a failure, and it had no issues whatsoever.  The only hiccup I found was in the initial creation where it would come up with errors.  A quick google search recommended disabling and re-enabling each drive in device manager which worked like a charm.