Can you use different sized drives in raid 10?

[theEmbark]

Do all drives need to be the same size?

Or could you have a pair of 4tb drives a pair of 1tb drives and eight 500gb drive pairs?

My understanding as of today is yes you can but will each drive act as a 500gb drive or would I have the total 9tb available?

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[kanewolf]

You would get space equal to a multiple of the smallest device. In your example with 12 drives total you would get 6 x 500GB == 3TB.

 

[theEmbark]

Okay that was my worry. Trying to figure out what to do with my storage situation. Looking to get a new NAS because I need more storage. Right now I have 8 x 500gb in that system. I usually stay away from larger drives because if they fail you lose more data. Plus I'm in music production so sometimes I want a particular project on a drive then I pull and archive it.

Maybe I will sell the 4 x 4tb drives I have and buy a lot of 500gb drives.

 

[kanewolf]

Depending on the RAID controller you could potentially make other RAID 1 volumes from the two 4TB and 2 1TB. I don't think I would get any fancier than that.

 

[theEmbark]

I think I can get $300-400 for the 4 x 4tb western reds which easily could get me another 10-20 500gb drives.

Another sort / of not really related question:
If I pull a drive because it's full for storage or to load later do I need to pull the mirror of it too? Is there any risk in storing hard drives or is it kind of like CDs where as long as you take care of them you are fine?

Thanks again,
Kevin

 

[kanewolf]

If you want disks which can be used standalone, then I wouldn't recommend RAID at all. Just do backups. Maybe setup the four 4TB disks as a RAID5 as your backup pool and then use the discrete 500GB as your working storage.

 

[graham3d3d]

Could you do it by partitioning the 4tb into 500mb parts?

 

[USAFRet]

Could you do it by partitioning the 4tb into 500mb parts?

1. That's a really dumb idea.

2. This thread is 2 years old. Please don't dredge up the past. Thanks.