New NAS configuration (poll inside! Yay!)

[romeo55]

Other: DrivePool

 

Combines any type/size drive into one drive pool (like JBOD). Except you can tack on more drives without having to rebuild the array or move data. You can also lose a drive and you only lose the data on that drive.

 

If you want redudancy you can turn on file duplication (turns it into a RAID 1 basically) or run another program like flex or snapraid to turn one drive into a parity drive if you don't want to lose 50% of your space.

 

Very Simple. Runs completely behind the scenes. But future expansion at the click of a button sold me. I'm too cheap to buy exact same size HDDs. See sig for the old/new HDDs I use for 5.5TB. Only con I can think of is that it only performs as fast as the one drive allows... but I'm not too interested in speed. 45-100MB/s is plenty fast for my needs.

Edited December 14, 2014 by Sagittaria

[Waco]

You can also lose a drive and you only lose the data on that drive.

 

If you want redudancy you can turn on file duplication (turns it into a RAID 1 basically)

If a drive returns bad data (and this does happen) your files are hosed even with duplication.

[romeo55]

 

You can also lose a drive and you only lose the data on that drive.

 

If you want redudancy you can turn on file duplication (turns it into a RAID 1 basically)

If a drive returns bad data (and this does happen) your files are hosed even with duplication.

 

 

True. This occurs with any RAID. I haven't tested it but the same company makes a program called DriveScanner. When paired, Drivepool will automatically "evacuate" drives throwing SMART errors and such. A complete catch-all? Probably not. But it's interesting.

 

But regardless, the only traditional way around that I know of around this are some sort of backup.

[Waco]

That's why my filesystem is ZFS. If a drive returns bad data it can be corrected.