Different disk sizes and raid profiles - is this possible?

I’m on the verge of jumping from FreeNAS to Rockstor for my home NAS, and this might be the last answer I need to pull the trigger.

I have 3 HDD drives: one each of 1,2,3TB. I need some kind of redundancy to deal with a single drive failing(which could happen soon), and then the maximum space available. I read in document that Rockstor doesn’t work with partitions(only whole disks), so is it possible to start with these 3 disks, and build a RAID5 pool that’s bigger than 1TB? or should I stick with 3TB of RAID1 for now, and when I got around for more 3TB drives, add them in, and re-profile the pool to use RAID 5?

another question: Can I install Rockstor on a pair of USB drive used as RAID1 array?

There is a btrfs calculator here that will tell you, that a raid5 only makes sense if you have your largest device at least twice.
But having btrfs allows you to change the raid level at a later point.

Regarding the Rockstor installation, see here

Have fun!

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@arneko and @hxdai The mdraid on system disk install howto does have a pending pr by myself but I’m afraid I have been delayed in some further changes I wanted to add as I’m hoping to add the ability to maintain btrfs on / as the current howto defaults to ext4 on /.

Hopefully I can get this sorting shortly by way of either further additions to the existing pr or a fresh one on top of the existing pr.