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reddog
26th February 2008, 01:58
hey guys, been awhile since i posted here. Hope everyone is well !

i've been playing around with different NAS solutions, and at the moment i have settled on Naslite2-HDD. I'm not totally satisfied with it due to the lack features, specifically the inability to go "live" (securely) when the need arises.

The how-to related to Sme Server specifically states: Please note that if you use more than one hard disk, all hard disks must be identical in size!

My question is, how does the sme-server handle different size drives? what are the consequences of using different size drives? If i use all the same sized drives (160G x 3), do i have 480gigs of storage, or is it 160 gigs mirrored?

Please educate me!
wpwood3
26th February 2008, 08:34
With Qty-3 160GB drives you will get the following:

SME version 7.0 or earlier sets 3 drives as RAID-5 which means 320 GB of storage (160GB for parity)

SME version 7.1 sets 3 drives with 2 in a RAID-1 mirrored array and 1 hot spare so you have 160 GB of storage.


Your server will be automatically configured as follows:

1 Drive - Software RAID 1 (ready to accept a second drive).
2 Drives - Software RAID 1
3-5 Drives - Software RAID 5 (4-5 drives with SME 7.1)
6+ Drives - Software RAID 6

I believe you can use different sized drives but each drive will be formatted the same size as the smallest drive. If you have a 100GB and 2 160GB drives then all must be formatted to 100 GB.
With SME 7.0 if you utilize more than one drive, they should all be identical in size and model. From SME 7.1 this is no longer a requirement
reddog
27th February 2008, 02:51
thank you for the reply,

so.....if i were to use 3-160 gig drives, and 1-250gig usb drive. Only 160 gigs of the usb drive would be utilized? or does that get treated as a hot spare?

I'm sorry for my ignorance on the subject, i have a hard time grasping the whole raid array, mirrored or not, as well as the different types of raid that can be done........guess i'm off to do some googling:)

thanks again
wpwood3
27th February 2008, 03:09
I doubt you can use a USB drive.