Homebrew NAS

[Mercutio]

I've now got a steadily growing pile of older disks (from 320GB to around 600GB so not SUPER old).

Looking at throwing them all in an old case out of the way in the house somewhere and rigging it up as a NAS.

Main question is: With a lot of the software solutions that like to use their own software raid solution, do any of them allow the ability to just throw random disks at the pool and have it added in a sensible way with a little redundancy and/or speed?

Assuming the ability to add an SSD for caching, UPS to give the SSD some time to flush to disks etc etc to speed things up is raidzX (freenas) going to do a decent job?

 

[El Pew]

Main question is: With a lot of the software solutions that like to use their own software raid solution, do any of them allow the ability to just throw random disks at the pool and have it added in a sensible way with a little redundancy and/or speed?

FlexRAID, SnapRAID, UnRAID and even Windows 8/Server 2012 will all give you RAID4-like capability with different sized disks, although in most cases you will lose the biggest disk (or one of the biggest disks if you have a couple the same size) to parity. Exactly how it will work depends on which platform you intend to go for.

I think only ZFS supports SSD caching but I'm not sure if it works well with dissimilar disks. You certainly can't add/remove disks as easily as you can in the other four I mentioned.