
The only requirement is that your parity drives must be as big as your biggest data drive. For example, I have 18x 3TB + 2x 4TB drives for a total of 62TB - no space lost. In Unraid you can also mix and match drives, and you get 100% of the capacity of each drive. As you can see, with similar capacity drives to what you have now, with only 24 drives you can easily have a similar total storage to what you have across 31 drives in your Drobos. If you had all 4TB drives, that would be 88TB.

If you had half 3TB and half 4TB drives, that would be 77TB. Assuming you had all 3TB drives in a 24 bay enclosure, that would be 22 data drives for 66TB. With that many drive bays, you'll definitely want to use dual parity (two drives). Unraid is very efficient with regards to storage space lost due to parity. Just use this thread to post whatever advice that you can give me and if you have another device that is not an unraid solution just let me know. I know a really quiet rig is a little too much to hope for, but if that can be considered let me know. If someone has an idea on a prebuilt machine I will consider it. I have experience building PCs before and the only difficulty I've had is determining how much thermal paste to use. It does not need to be pretty or decked out with lights. My goal is to try not to spend more than $2500 - $3000 for just the device without the drives costs added in. I currently am using 31 drives in my Drobos but they are mostly 3 - 4 TB drives plus Drobo overhead. My goal is to have a least 20 - 24 drive bays of capacity. Right now I have about 75 TB of drive space encompassing all my Drobos.

Paul said it would be nice to post my need here to get some advice on what type box to build with the following specs. Since I have now lost some data on one of my drobos and also having to deal with their limitations, I am more receptive to building a new box. Over the last year Paul has been encouraging me to build an unraid box for my media server.


I have had PCs running 24 hours a day for over 8 - 10 years without failing. These boxes are expensive but cheaply made. This time not only did one of my Drobos fail but it took my data with it. I have been playing around with Drobo boxes for over 10 years and 4 -5 of these cruddy machines have died after a few years service.
