RAID 6 and mixing drives with different capacities

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tomiisek
Getting the hang of things
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RAID 6 and mixing drives with different capacities

Post by tomiisek »

Hi! I am going to buy new 8- or 12-bay NAS and new drives but I can't buy all drives at once, I can buy max 4 drives per year. Is it possible to buy 18TB drives now, another 20TB drives in 2021 and another 22TB drives in 2022 to the same NAS? Or when I buy some 18TB drives so the other drives have to be 18TB as well?
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Thisisnotmyname
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Re: RAID 6 and mixing drives with different capacities

Post by Thisisnotmyname »

you can use different capacities but the lowest capacity of any single drive in the array will be used for all of them in RAID6. i.e. if you have two 10 TB, four 12 TB, and six 18TB you will only use the first 10 TB of each drive. The remaining space on the 12TB and 18TB drives will be wasted until you replace all of the smaller drives. Once all the drives are at a larger size you can expand the available size to use the remaining space.
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