I’m planning on building a new home server and was thinking about the possibility to use disc spanning to create matching disk sizes for a RAID array. I have 2x2TB drives and 4x4TB drives.
Comparison with RAID 5
4 x 4 TB drives
- 1 RAID array
- 12 TB total
4 x 4 TB drives & 2 x 2 TB drives
- 2 RAID arrays
- 14 TB total
5 x 4* TB drives
- Several 4TB disks and 2 smaller disks spanned to produce a 4 TB block device
- 16 TB total
I’m not actually planning on actually doing this because this setup will probably have all kinds of problems, however I do wonder, what would those problems be?
Synology has it’s own version of raid5 that can handle your specific disk configuration without any modification:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?drives=4 TB|4 TB|4 TB|4 TB|2 TB|2 TB&raid=SHR_1|RAID_5
Not sure if similar things are availible on other platforms.