Hi,
I've been playing for some time (mostly the hard and painful way) with storage space.
It was frustrated most of time but that frustation went down as I understood better how is works.
I do however have some questions left, I'd like to share with you.
the server has 3 purposes:
media server to feed 2 HTPC clients (blu-ray rips, home video, photos. Total = 11 TB)
some virtual machines (these are currently stored on a 512GB SSD)
backup server (for imovies: 5TB, lightroom: 2TB and my 500 GB virtual machines)
I don't currently backup my blu-ray rips as I still have the disks.
I have the following disks:
3 4TB HDD
7 3TB HDD
My initial concept was to create 2 storage pools with 1 virtual disk (VD) in each storage space
VD1 would be set up with thin provisioning, parity (or simple) and a volume of 50TB
=> I do need to be able to feed 2 media center clients at the same time so I could also set up this VD with no resiliency
VD2 would be set up with thin provisioning, parity and a volume of 50TB
=> this one is only for backup purposes
1st question:
at this point I have no clue wether I should have 1 storage space with 2 VD's or 2 storage spaces with 1 VD each.
I'm afraid that if I have only 1 storage space and then if 1 disk goes down, both VD would go in degraded mode or go offline.
I also noticed that with 2 storage spaces windows was unable to correctly display what physical disks were attached to the spaces.
sometimes, the same physical disk was displayed on the 2 storage spaces, or physical disks would not be displayed or physical disk have the wrong Name/Capacity combination. I think this is only a display issue as refreshing the GUI would normally fix this.
I still have one Segate 4TB disk that always show a Western Digital name, though.
the above issues didn't affect accessing the data, though, but they do worry me.
I initially set up VD1 with no resiliency but had experienced some issues with mixing 2 3TB disks with 2 4TB disks. A few weeks later they all got full and I added 1 4TB. The virtual disk would still go offline despite the 5th disk (4TB) beeing mostly empty.
I recently learned that the issue was that my VD had 2 columns while I had 5 disks in the storage space. I should add 2 disks, although I'm not sure if the additional 2 disks must be of the same size (I suspect they should)
This brings me to my 2nd question:
if I setup VD1 with no resiliency and with only one column, would this allow me to mix different disk sizes and add additional disk in the future one by one, as needed?
I I understand this correctly, having only one column would provide the lowest performance as data is only written to one disk at a time.
With 2-colum setup, I had write speed of 200 MB/s, which surprised me a little bit as write speeds on one disk normally never exceed 80 MB/s.
my 3rd question:
If I setup VD1 with parity (3 columns minimum), can I still mix 3 and 4 TB disks (and make use of all the space)? if yes, how should I increase space in the future? (future disk acquisitions would only be disks of 4TB or higher)
many thanks-