Snapraid setup advice

    Hi All,
    I have the following 4 drives in my HP microserver:


    2tb (1.6tb free)
    2tb (260gb free)
    3tb (40gb free)
    4tb (2tb free)


    I want to setup Snapraid to give me some redundancy. I read that you need to choose your largest disk for parity. The issue is I don't want to use my 4tb disk as the most it will ever use is 3tb in parity if I've understood it correctly (the largest data disk should be the max size of the parity). It seems a bit wasteful to use a 4TB just for parity.


    All have data on them but none are full and I could move data around if I wanted to but I don't really want to partition any drives (they are all using max size and one partition on each).


    Some advice would be really appreciated on the best way to most efficiently use these drives in snapraid .


    Thanks!


    M


    OMV

    You don't need raid controller, you can use OMV soft raid.
    Since you already have data on those drives, sticking to SnapRAID would be more suitable for you.

    OMV v5.0
    Asus Z97-A/3.1; i3-4370
    32GB RAM Corsair Vengeance Pro

    The parity information is stored in a single file, and as you know this file will grow to be just over the size of your largest data drive when the drive full. So, if you use the 4TB drive as the parity drive, and given that your largest data drive is 3TB, then as you know you will have just under 1TB of "wasted" space on the 4TB parity drive.


    But you might be able to use that "wasted" space for data storage so long as you understand that it can't/won't be protected by snapraid.


    The other thing you can do is use the 4TB drive for parity alone and just wait until you need to replace one of the other drives, either due to failure, or you are completely out of space on the data drives. Then replace it with a 4TB drive. Now your 4TB parity drive will begin to be fully utilized.


    Or you could wait until you need to replace a data drive, put something in larger than 4TB, use it for the parity drive, and make the current 4TB parity drive a data drive. Using this strategy, you can grow your array by replacing one disk at a time as larger and larger drives become available and fall in price. This is also a good strategy if you are limited to the number of physical drives you can have in the machine and you don't want or need to upgrade it. Even though I have 12 SATA ports on my OMV's MB, and have 12 drive bays in the case, this is my plan for the future.

    --
    Google is your friend and Bob's your uncle!


    OMV AMD64 7.x on headless Chenbro NR12000 1U 1x 8m Quad Core E3-1220 3.1GHz 32GB ECC RAM.

    Thanks for the advice guys - I went with moving the data off the 4tb, repartitioning the 4TB into a 3.1 TB parity disk with ~990GB "SCRATCH" disk for non protected items - now I have a 3 TB parity and I can use the extra space for other non critical stuff


    Thanks again gderf, tinh !!

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