Having gradually built up my media collection to near the capacity of my 16TB external HDD, I’ve reached the point where I’ll probably need to build a RAID array to keep the collection in one place. Assuming the RAID array will be at least 32TB, I have a few questions:

  1. From what I’ve read RAID arrays can help mitigate the risk of individual drives failing if extra space is allotted on the hard drives. Assuming a total capacity of 32TB, how much of that space would be reserved by the RAID array for data loss prevention?

  2. Is there a certain type of hard drive I would have to use? Aside from my 16TB drive, I also have two 2 8TB drives that I’d ideally like to be able to re-use in the RAID array, but have left them in their enclosures for the time being.

  3. If the hard drives in the array have different transfer speeds, does the array as a whole default to the slowest one?

  4. Whether the hard drives I already have are compatible or not, what RAID enclosure and hard drives would you recommend?

  • quirzle@kbin.social
    6·
    10 months ago
    1. https://www.synology.com/en-au/support/RAID_calculator or similar is good to easily do these calculations
    2. No, but more RAID configurations than not are limited by the smallest size drive. It’s a factor to consider, assuming you can’t afford to just buy a bunch of disks. I wound up maintaining two separate NAS devices, one of which gets my old, smaller disks.
    3. Generally yes, though you’d be surprised how little difference disk speed makes once you get enough of them in an array.
    4. I use Synology with various shucked WD externals. I have a bunch of other stuff in my homelab though, so I need the storage to not be it’s own project, else I likely would have built something less expensive. I’m sure there will be better suggestions in this thread than mine.