I am thinking of setting up my first home NAS and Rockstor caught my attention. I have got a few old drives lying around—2 x 4TB and 1 x 2TB & I want to know how well Rockstor would handle a mixed-drive setup such as this. I have heard good things about BTRFS and snapshots but I am a little unsure how stable it is with uneven drive sizes.
My plan is to use the NAS mainly for storing media & maybe later on play around with Docker. I am also dabbling in Kubernetes Training right now, so I might even try running some lightweight containers once I feel confident.
Anyone here running a similar setup? I want to know if Rockstor works well with this kind of hardware mix. Also, how easy is it to add more drives down the line without losing data?
Also i have check this Old Nas Drives & Rockstor still want help Any insights, suggestions or things to watch out for would be awesome.
Mixed size drive setups are actually a strength of btrfs, and adding new ones (or replacing existing ones with higher capacity ones) is pretty straightforward. Ideally, your system would have ECC memory to minimize data inconsistencies.
I don’t have a mixed drive setup, so I can’t prove to you that it works well, but I believe in the community there are quite a few users that have something like that.
As you might have already read (or not), the Rockon functionality is built on top of the docker engine, using json based configurations to bring up and manage containers. Of course, nothing will stop you from utilizing the docker setup for running containers outside of Rockstor’s purview. Just note that docker compose is not installed as part of the Rockstor installation, in case you’re looking to utilize that, as at the time Rockons were introduced (think 10 years ago), that was not widely enough adopted.
I’ve used Rockstor on top of a wide variety of drive types and sizes from 128 GB NVMe to 3 TB HDD and plenty of in-between options with reasonable success.
One ‘optimisation’ I made over the last couple of years has been to pair up the disks in pools with more intended purpose: i.e. keep SSDs in a single pool for faster storage needs and keep large HDDs in a pool with lower speed requirements. Think virtual machine storage versus long term archival.
As @Hooverdan said, mixing drive sizes (and types) is one of the strengths of BTRFS so go for it and see how it goes for your specific needs. You can easily change pool configuration later if you change your mind.
Don’t forget to share your setup and progress with us
