I’m planning on building a new home server and was thinking about the possibility to use disc spanning to create matching disk sizes for a RAID array. I have 2x2TB drives and 4x4TB drives.
Comparison with RAID 5
4 x 4 TB drives
- 1 RAID array
- 12 TB total
4 x 4 TB drives & 2 x 2 TB drives
- 2 RAID arrays
- 14 TB total
5 x 4* TB drives
- Several 4TB disks and 2 smaller disks spanned to produce a 4 TB block device
- 16 TB total
I’m not actually planning on actually doing this because this setup will probably have all kinds of problems, however I do wonder, what would those problems be?
What are you going to be running on these disks? I haven’t used zfs, maybe it supports mismatched sizes? Or maybe you could do one array with the 4s, another with the 2s, and use LVM to pool them together? Or just keep them separate and fill them up independently.