If your asking me if I conducted my own due-diligence prior to posting here; I made it through the first 140 pages or so of the manual, and then when I didnt see what I was looking for, I quickly skimmed the rest. Then I conducted five+ minutes of searching this forum and reading previous posts, but I am still not sure on the capabilities IRT mixed hardware, specifically HDDs and FreeNAS. My real question is how FreeNAS handles different size drives grouped together, as the left/right limits of my hardware are pretty unflexible.
Can FreeNAS emulate JBOD? Are there any redundency controls built in (similar to microsoft drive extender)...where data stored in a JBOD configuration is duplicated on different drives for safety? Is an external back-up solution the ONLY (not most reliable) way to duplicate data?
I guess I missed those aspects of the documentation, and to be honest, linked references to the WIKI without explanations are not the answer I was expecting... at least not from a Senior Member. OTOH, if this is the standard level of help given to new users to FreeNAS, then I think you answered my question perfectly. Thank you for your time.