nas mismatched drives

Atomicnerd64 · November 17, 2016

I want a nas but I have many mismatched drives. is there an os that I can install on my computer that will work with that or should I just buy more of one kind of drives?

done12many2 · November 17, 2016

16 minutes ago, Atomicnerd64 said:

I want a nas but I have many mismatched drives. is there an os that I can install on my computer that will work with that or should I just buy more of one kind of drives?

Mismatched drives will work just fine in a standard installation.

Matt_98 · November 17, 2016

17 minutes ago, Atomicnerd64 said:

I want a nas but I have many mismatched drives. is there an os that I can install on my computer that will work with that or should I just buy more of one kind of drives?

freenas might be able to do something

Mikensan · November 17, 2016

If they're the same size but mismatched brands, it's not really a big deal. If they're mismatched sizes, then you'll want to pool them together. For Windows there's Storage Spaces (built in to windows, needs to be enabled) and FlexRAID (paid for). For Linux there's unRaid (price varies on number of drives).

FreeNAS you'd have to create a dev for each drive individually then put them into a volume. However if any single drive dies, it takes out the entire volume. I would not recommend this. If you put them into any sort of raid array, each drive will scale down to the size of your smallest drive and slowest. So say you have 4 8tb 7200rpm drives and 1 1tb 5400rpm drive, it would mean once you raid them you'd only have 5 1tb 5400rpm drives.

foobar42 · November 19, 2016

Actually mismatching the drive vendor is a common technique against protecting against one particular batch of drives failing after a certain amount of time.

I'd recommend you to search for pairs with the same or similar capacity, using them as a mirrored vdev in ZFS (FreeNAS or stock FreeBSD), and stripe them together for a RAID10, which resilvers faster if one drive fails, since you only have to rebuild one mirror, and also has more IOPs then a zRAID5.

Also, when you decide that you wan't to grow it, you just add more mirrored vdevs.

And if you wan't to grow a vdev, you just offline one drive, add a larger one, and use zpool online -e to grow the vdev to the common size of both disks in the vdev.