Support for software RAID with different-sized drives?

[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 🙂

[Sparkrdom]

The pool will be limited to the smallest drive in the pool. https://serverfault.com/questions/163687/zfs-can-one-mirrored-pair-be-a-different-size-than-another-pair

 

Though, if you slowly upgrade them to all match, once they do, it'll immediately increase your capacity to the total storage available.

Edited December 1, 2024 by Sparkrdom

[markrieder]

HexOS is an extension of TrueNAS and it does not support different disk sizes. Always refers to the smallest disk used. Modifications would have to be made to the TrueNAS source code and thus the collaboration would not be able to continue for further updates.

[ignasbucius]

HexOS can only run on x86 and Raspberry PI is based on ARM, not x86. It wouldn't work.

[sunnysingh]

I'm also planning to use with "ORICO 5 Bay USB 3.0 3.5 inch External Hard Drive Enclosure Support 80TB (5 x 16TB) Aluminum Alloy HDD Enclosure with Fan / 150W / Disk Data Storage"

But not sure how this ORICO works. Will i be able to use my old computer with ORICO & HexOS?

Will HexOS able to detect all hdd individually? 

[Magnus]

Hi there! A quick look on google returns this;

TrueNAS/HexOS is a Linux system, so if this is accurate, it would not work.