Arch Linux

cdwijs

Member

Registered: 2010-04-24

Posts: 289

NAS like solution with non-uniform disks, is ZFS capable of it?

Hi All,

I've collected quite a collection of hard drives over the years, and I would like to use them to make a NAS solution. Those drives range from very small, to (in my eyes) very large.

So suppose I have 5 drives, like this:
640GB
500GB
320GB
250GB
100GB

I would like to have a way to put data on it so one drive can die without loosing any data.
Can ZFS do this? Is there any software that supports something wacky like this?

Secondly, Not all my data is equally valuable. Generally, the bigger the file, the less I value it. For instance, the .torrent file is valuable, and the downloaded.... linux iso is not, as it can be re-downloaded. So I would like to have my small files on all drives, and the bigger the file get, the less drives it's on. Secondly, the newer the file is, the more valuable it is.
Does somebody know a backup solution that does this?

Cheers,
Cedric

Awebb

Member

Registered: 2010-05-06

Posts: 6,599

Re: NAS like solution with non-uniform disks, is ZFS capable of it?

Your search term would be "zfs disks with different size" and google will give you the answer in a box and the first link. Doesn't look good for redundancy. You might want to have a careful look at btrfs.

Furthermore, file system redundancy is not a backup solution by any means. There is no "file value based redundancy" in any RAID system.

Baraclese

Member

Registered: 2008-05-28

Posts: 48

Re: NAS like solution with non-uniform disks, is ZFS capable of it?

You could have a look at snapraid. It does not do all that you want, but it will allow you to save parity data to the disks that you specify. It behaves like a manual raid solution in which you need to refresh parity data yourself (with a command). The disks will still be accessible only as single disks however (which is a positive - if a disk fails, you can still use the rest of the disks without requiring a rebuild of a raid array). On the other hand btrfs may provide a solution closer to what you intend to do: https://carfax.org.uk/btrfs-usage/ a RAID 5 setup would give you 1170GB of space with those disk sizes.