Questions around disk space and parity in unraid

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

So I recently found out that I have sh*t my leg… I was about to set up unraid but just before dipping my toes I was told that the parity drive needs to be the same or larger in size, really wish I had done more thorough reseach before recently buying that 10TB HDD hehe…

My planned setup was; 250 GB - SSD (Cache) 1 TB - HDD (Parity) 2 TB - HDD (Pool) 10 TB - HDD (Pool)

So what are my option now that I have messed that up, what would you recommend? To go without parity or is there another way?

Any help is appriciated, I am still quite new to selfhosting/linux :)

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CalicoJack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If it was me, I’d just go without parity temporarily and grab another drive for that when I could. A new system should be safe enough for a while, just not forever.

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- LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah I think this is the “best” for me right now unfortunately… But even buying a new 10TB disk ‘just’ for backup is kind of unfortunate… I might try to sell it or trade it for multiple other disks.
  
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  - PoopMonster@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Gohardrive has those 10tb for under $90, they’ve been used for like 5 years but if it’s non essential data they should last a long time and might be a good option.
    
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Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
With that, the best you can do is glue the 1 and 2 TB drives together as a 3TB drive, and match it with an equal size partition on the 10 TB HDD. Those will have full redundancy, but not the remaining 7TB.

But you can at least have 3TB redundant, and 7TB of more risky storage. It can be used for things you can recover a different way, like game libraries, movie libraries, maybe backups of the 3TB since RAID doesn’t protect against accidental deletions and modifications.

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- Moonrise2473@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can’t do that on unRAID.
  
  You can do that on Linux but IMHO if you’re not a Linux guru you shouldn’t even think to do that if you care about the data
  
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stalfoss@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
250GB cache 1 TB Pool 2 TB Pool (2TB Parity partition + 8TB non-redundant storage partition) = 10 TB HDD

You’ll have a total of 3 TB that’s protected, and 8 TB that’s not. When you get another 10 TB drive in the future, then you’ll have a total of 13 TB that’s protected.

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- LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Didn’t know this was possible, can I do the partitioning via unraid gui? How risky is it to do it this way?
  
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  - lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Like they said, the 2 GB partition would be covered by parity and can be recovered, the 8 GB cannot.
    
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tal@lemmy.today ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You can set this sort of “redundancy with different-size drives without wasting a bunch of space” thing up at the block device level – I understand that Synology’s “Hybrid RAID” is a Linux system doing that. But you’ve got to be careful doing that; configure it wrong and you won’t have redundancy.

I don’t know, somewhat-surprisingly, of a software package that aims to manage a collection of disks to do this configuration at a high level, adding and removing disks and such.

That being said, even in such a configuration, you can only do so much. If you have one drive of 10GB and the rest of all your drives intended for redundant storage sum to 3TB, you can’t have a configuration that can handle failure of your 10TB drive and can store more than 3TB of data with redundancy, no matter how you slice and dice things. You’re going to have to waste 7TB of space or store data without redundancy.

What’s best to do is probably going to depend on how much you want to spend.

If you want 10TB of redundant storage and a second 10TB drive is something that you’re willing to get, I’d probably just get a second 10TB drive and set them up with mirrored RAID.

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momsi@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
How I’d go above this is dependent on how much storage you expect to be using mid term/until you want/can buy another drive.

Must have 7TB ? Swap the 10tb for 2x4TB, then do 4TB parity 4+2+1TB as Data drives.

Is 3TB enough for the time being? Keep the 10TB and use as parity, 1+2TB as Data drives. When full, go for up to another 10TB as Data.

That second option is more upgradable in the future.

I’m guessing everyone meant Data drives by saying “pool”. In unraid, Data drives are the ones protected by parity, in the array. Pools are “out of the array”, not protected by parity.

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- LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thanks for this! I actually just found yet another 2TB HDD that I had forgotten about, so I might just go for what you said! Leaves me with 5TB for now and 10TB for the parity.
  
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art101@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
250GB - cache 1TB - Pool 2TB - Pool 10TB - Parity

With only 3TB in the pool you’re going to be increasing the size of the pool potentially quite quickly depending on if you’re ripping DVDs or Blu-Rays to it.

You’ll soon need another drive to boost that pool size and I promise, that parity will keep those tears at bay if something happens.

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ioslife@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Now your next drive can be 10TB! Not a mistake, you were just unintentionally future proofing

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- LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fair enough 😅
  
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Moonrise2473@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Temporarily use the 10tb drive as unassigned drive or another cache (in the latest version you can have multiple caches, they’re not called cache anymore) until you buy another two 10tb drives. One to add as parity, the other to add to the pool, then copy back the stuff, add the original 10tb back

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- LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Thing is I dont ever see myself getting another 10TB drive, kinda bought this one as the “only disk ill ever need…” (i know they dont last forever but u get the gist). So I defo wasnt planning on buying even more of them. My photos only take up 500GB at the moment haha, so 10TB is already overkill for me, hence why im wanting to trade my 10TB drive in for two 4TB drives.
  
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hayalci@fstab.sh ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
ZFS has a “copies=N” setting, but documentation and discussion I can find say there’s no guarantee that the copies will end up on different devices (vdevs in ZFS parlance)

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