Hi Guys,
I am an absolute noob to NAS. With recently upgrading my internet service to an unshaped/uncapped business account, I have had sweet internet speeds and as a result took absolute advantage of that. Result: full hard drives.
Over the past few months I added a new HDD here and there and had since built a nice collection of different brands (Seagate, WD, Maxtor etc.) and of different sizes (250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 3TB units). Having read through many online tutorials of how to set up FreeNAS, I am definitely leaning towards taking this approach to effectively consolidate all my media, data and other backups. I own and run a software and graphic design company, so much of the important data (code backups, vector graphics etc.) also get stored on my many different HDDs.
Leading to my question: As I understand with RAID, essentially taking 2 or more HDDs, each of the same type/brand/capacity makes an array of those HDDs at the smallest one's capacity. One or two crashes, data still in tact. I also understand that if you like to live on the edge, you can rather stripe all the HDDs, which essentially lobs all your sets of capacity together for one nice big pool of data. One or more HDDs crash, you go back to the stone age.
So, my question: I would classify myself as an "edge" kinda guy, so I am going to stripe a bunch of drives lying around at home. Since not a single one belongs to a distinct brand, age or capacity, can I add all these puppies into an existing machine I have sitting around (a former media center pc), stripe them and carry on with life, or do they all need to belong to a distinct brand, capacity?
Looking forward to your answers and assistance!
I am an absolute noob to NAS. With recently upgrading my internet service to an unshaped/uncapped business account, I have had sweet internet speeds and as a result took absolute advantage of that. Result: full hard drives.
Over the past few months I added a new HDD here and there and had since built a nice collection of different brands (Seagate, WD, Maxtor etc.) and of different sizes (250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 3TB units). Having read through many online tutorials of how to set up FreeNAS, I am definitely leaning towards taking this approach to effectively consolidate all my media, data and other backups. I own and run a software and graphic design company, so much of the important data (code backups, vector graphics etc.) also get stored on my many different HDDs.
Leading to my question: As I understand with RAID, essentially taking 2 or more HDDs, each of the same type/brand/capacity makes an array of those HDDs at the smallest one's capacity. One or two crashes, data still in tact. I also understand that if you like to live on the edge, you can rather stripe all the HDDs, which essentially lobs all your sets of capacity together for one nice big pool of data. One or more HDDs crash, you go back to the stone age.
So, my question: I would classify myself as an "edge" kinda guy, so I am going to stripe a bunch of drives lying around at home. Since not a single one belongs to a distinct brand, age or capacity, can I add all these puppies into an existing machine I have sitting around (a former media center pc), stripe them and carry on with life, or do they all need to belong to a distinct brand, capacity?
Looking forward to your answers and assistance!