Mix & Match drives in the same pool?

[Pyrre]

I have been planning for quite a while to reinstall my home server from Window to Unraid, but then I saw the LTT video about HexOS, it seemed like there perfect NAS like OS for me to install, with its convenient features and all!

But now, a few days later, I remembered why I wanted to run unraid, my drives are a weird mix of these:

1 - 18TB

2 - 8TB

3 - 4TB

 and now I am afraid I will have to ask for a refund if I can’t mix these deives, or how else would I be able to use them with HexOS?

 

[tye_the_pony]

on the hexos side of things at this time no but on truenas side it will allow it but hexhub dashboard will freakout  

[Syko]

 

if it will let you create the pool!

Then it takes the smaller drive - 4tb 

But it also turn the other two drives into 4tb , which as you see would a total waste of the larger drives.

[arvinpw]

even if you going to use unRAID, the parity drive HAS TO BE AT LEAST the same size or larger than the data drives.
Which in your case, you have to use 18TB as a parity drive, and you left out with 8TB and 4TB,
That will be a waste for 18TB drive. Just build with the same size all across your drives.

[Pyrre]

2 minutes ago, arvinpw said:

even if you going to use unRAID, the parity drive HAS TO BE AT LEAST the same size or larger than the data drives.
Which in your case, you have to use 18TB as a parity drive, and you left out with 8TB and 4TB,
That will be a waste for 18TB drive. Just build with the same size all across your drives.

Well, many years of buying new drives have left me with this compilation of drives 😅
When I bought my 18TB drive I never had any intentions of converting my server to a NAS, so at that point it was easy to just connect new drives to my Windows host.

One possible configuration I thought I might do is one pool for the 18TB drive, with stuff I dont really care to protect, then run the 8TB drive as a parity drive with the rest of them.

[jonp]

Hi there,

Mixing and matching drives of different sizes with ZFS today does require you to give up the capacity on the larger-sized drives.  For that reason, our wizard limits mixing to only with drives that are within 90% of the largest size drive in the pool.  We will make this more configurable in the future.

While we do believe mixing and matching different sized drives to be of value, the main feature that ZFS was missing prior to recent was the ability to expand one drive at a time (RAIDz Expansion).  We do support this on HexOS today.

[Dylan]

1 minute ago, jonp said:

Hi there,

Mixing and matching drives of different sizes with ZFS today does require you to give up the capacity on the larger-sized drives.  For that reason, our wizard limits mixing to only with drives that are within 90% of the largest size drive in the pool.  We will make this more configurable in the future.

While we do believe mixing and matching different sized drives to be of value, the main feature that ZFS was missing prior to recent was the ability to expand one drive at a time (RAIDz Expansion).  We do support this on HexOS today.

That's a fair trade-off.