Bundling drives without raid configuration / Alternatives

[wasabi]

Hey all,
Me and some friends are building a file server together with different configurations for drives. Some disks will be personal storage with raid1 solution but we're also going to have several disks together for media.

At the moment this media pool consists of 3*3TB and 2*2TB. What we want to do is grouping them all together like with LVM, (13TB partition in this case). The data is not _that_ important so if a drive fails we want to loose the data stored on that drive and go on with our lives, in comparison to striping when a failed drive results in the loss of ALL data on the drives.

Is there any solution or do we need to make a volume for each drive to achieve this? With plugins like couchpotato and sickbeard it seems like a hassle to change the library paths just because one drive is filled up.

Is there something we're not considering and/or maybe we should look for another solution than FreeNAS and zfs?

All reflections are welcome!

Well met,
wasabi

 

[danb35]

That is the tradeoff you will have--if you pool all the drives together into a single volume, they will be striped, and the entire volume will be lost when a drive fails. If you want to segregate them, you'll need to create separate volumes. If you want to be able to control what goes on which disk, maybe you'd want to take a look at unRAID instead, though you'll have to pay a license fee to use more than 3 drives.