Hi all,
I’m building my first nas and currently trying unraid on a test machine only to realize unraid isn’t actually raid (I know silly mistake). I’ve already bought my drives so I’m looking to make it work with what I have. I have 2x6tb reds and 2x14tb red + ironwolf (had a spare of each so I just bought a matching one for each to pair up thinking I could raid 1).
Ideally, my first scenario that I’d love to make happen is:
- raid 10 where 6tb (mirrored) from the 2x6tb and 6tb (mirrored) from the 2x12tb are used in raid 10 config, while the remaining 8tb (mirrored) from the 2x14tb can be raid1.
If that’s not possible, then my fallback would just be:
- raid 1 both pairs, i.e. 2x6tb raid 1 so I have 6tb of mirrored storage and 2x14tb raid 1 so I have another 14tb of mirrored storage.
I’ve grown to like unraid since it would’ve allowed me to add more later and easily supports SSD cache but it doesn’t looking like it will be able to support my desired configuration with the drives I have. Is my first ideal scenario possible? If so, which OS would allow me to do it in the easiest manner? If not, perhaps my fallback. TIA
You could do your ideal scenario with LVM or with linux mdraid.
I’m not too familar with ZFS so not sure if you could do it on ZFS.
Unraid does support unequally sized drives, your parity drive just needs to be as large as your largest drive. It’s not true mirroring of course.
The easiest setup would be to create two RAID1 sets, this also gives your the highest chance of recovering data in case one or more drives die.
If its primary purpose is a NAS, you should be using a NAS OS
I strongly question why UnRAID lets you do something that a purpose-built NAS OS, like TrueNAS Core, does not
I would honestly just go with two separate mirrors unless you need performance (of course if all drives are CMR and on the same RPM level). With MDRAID or ZFS.