What exactly is JBOD?

Appleboy45 · March 30, 2018

I've been looking into getting into a NAS. Something I noticed is that they support JBOD. I've heard about this term, but I never really knew what it meant. I was wondering what exactly it is and when would it be practical to use it.

Electronics Wizardy · March 30, 2018

The drives just run as separate drives aka no raid. It can also mean pool, so the data will fill up one drive, then the next drive.

Used for mainly when you want something else to control the raid, or you want differnt drives to do different things with no raid.

For a home nas, single drive parity is normally suggested. Most raid boxes have a version that allow mixed drive sizes.

SonoDanshi · March 30, 2018

JBOD or Just a Bunch Of Disks is a means of spanning multiple drives so they somewhat act as a single storage medium. It was far more useful before 2TB drives became a defacto standard and people wanted to make use of several smaller drives. I run raid 5 at home as that's good enough for me and jbod has never been a consideration.