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Re:Handling storage and backup as a photographer by atrus on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @05:42AM (#19552420)
I'm not super well versed in storage stuff, but why is it when I read on building your own NAS with ZFS I have to use all the same capacity hard drive. If I have 5x 1tb drives and 1x 4tb I don't have 9tb of storage (minus replication costs) I have 6tb.

It seems with Drobo, I can throw any different size of drives in, and it just works. How can I build something like that on my own?

Re:Handling storage and backup as a photographer by dsr_ on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:00AM (#19553545)
Drobo adds, effectively, a chunking layer. Suppose that all drives are integer multiples of 1 TB. Split each drive into 1TB volumes, and make mirrors such that no volume is mirrored to another volume on the same drive. You gain storage efficiency at the cost of performance and complexity.

In the scenario above you could get 8TB protected by mirroring, or use a Z1, Z2 or Z3 scheme.