I'm a newbie to NAS solutions and RAID (hence why I've been holding out for HexOS), so forgive my ignorance
I have a limited budget going into this, and have multiple mismatched drives I've accrued over the years. Namely, a 2.5" 4TB HDD, 2 2.5" 512GB HDDs, and a 2TB 3.5" HDD, all of varying speeds.
I plan to go the poor-man's route and use my raspberry pi 4 along with something like this ORICO 4x 2.5"/3.5" SATA USB 3.0 Dock (I hope that this works as expected, but I have no idea if it's half-decent. Will do more research before purchasing, but also any advice is appreciated), but I have no idea if this wacky plan to use 4 drives completely mismatched is capacity and performance will be even somewhat effective.
I've read that many forms of RAID will choose the weakest link in terms of capacity, but I've also read that some software RAID solutions can artificially partition the drives into say 500GB sections and have a greater overall capacity than the smallest drive would otherwise allow.
Ideally I'm looking for about 1-2TB of total capacity to serve as an on-site backup for my and my spouse's computers, and I'm happy to buy more drives to accommodate this desire, but if it's possible to hold off on additional purchases for now and just use the ones I have that would be fantastic.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated, as I know next to nothing about all this beyond general hardware knowledge 🙂
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Jam
I'm a newbie to NAS solutions and RAID (hence why I've been holding out for HexOS), so forgive my ignorance
I have a limited budget going into this, and have multiple mismatched drives I've accrued over the years. Namely, a 2.5" 4TB HDD, 2 2.5" 512GB HDDs, and a 2TB 3.5" HDD, all of varying speeds.
I plan to go the poor-man's route and use my raspberry pi 4 along with something like this ORICO 4x 2.5"/3.5" SATA USB 3.0 Dock (I hope that this works as expected, but I have no idea if it's half-decent. Will do more research before purchasing, but also any advice is appreciated), but I have no idea if this wacky plan to use 4 drives completely mismatched is capacity and performance will be even somewhat effective.
I've read that many forms of RAID will choose the weakest link in terms of capacity, but I've also read that some software RAID solutions can artificially partition the drives into say 500GB sections and have a greater overall capacity than the smallest drive would otherwise allow.
Ideally I'm looking for about 1-2TB of total capacity to serve as an on-site backup for my and my spouse's computers, and I'm happy to buy more drives to accommodate this desire, but if it's possible to hold off on additional purchases for now and just use the ones I have that would be fantastic.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated, as I know next to nothing about all this beyond general hardware knowledge 🙂
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