UNRAID explain parity drive

RobTi · 4 Aug 2022 at 11:23

Hi so looking for a simple explanation of the above i have a truenas setup atm but find it too complicated to set up anything other than a plex share so looking at unraid. i have 4 x 4 Tb new drives and a couple of 120Gb ssd drives and a 1Tb old wd drive, but am lost at what a parity drive does and should i use one of the 4Tb for it or buy another larger drive ?
Thanks

chroniclard · 4 Aug 2022 at 11:46

Parity drive protects against data loss by using the biggest drive in your array to store parity bits. So if you have 4 x 4tb, 1 would be parity drive, giving you 12TB useable space.

You dont need a bigger drive for parity, but say if you wanted to add a few 18TB drives you would have to use one of those for parity as it uses the biggest. You can also run without a parity drive but its not recommended.

Unraid can also get complicated but there are tons of good guides and videos around.

You could also use your 120gb SSD drives as cache drives, though they are a tad small.

TheMightyTen · 4 Aug 2022 at 16:41

Watch some of Spaceinvader One's youtube channel, does some very good Unraid tutorials and explanations (some are a little out of date now but still helpful)

RobTi · 4 Aug 2022 at 16:44

TheMightyTen said:
Watch some of Spaceinvader One's youtube channel, does some very good Unraid tutorials and explanations (some are a little out of date now but still helpful)

Thanks will do