Possible to use different sized drives in a DIY NAS and still have redundancy?

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

I have a whole bunch of hard drives ranging from 750gb to 1.5tb and I was thinking about putting together my own NAS RAID-5 (or 6?) problem is I would like to use all these drives but have some redundancy, perhaps like raid 5/6? Is this possible? I read something about Windows Home Server's "drive extender" which seemed kinda promising but I am still fuzzy on the details, I would prefer a hardware solution but will go with a software solution too.

Any ideas on how to use these different sized drives (6 total at the moment) with redundancy would really be appreciated!

Cheers

-Gaiko

 

[thiggins]

You can use different-sized drives in a RAID array. But the smallest-capacity drive will determine the size of the array. In other words if you have a 500 GB and 1 TB drive in an array, it will be sized as though you had two 500 GB drives.

Windows Home Server does not use RAID, but uses a technique in which data is replicated to other drives or locations on a drive as a background task. Because it's not RAID, different capacity drives can be utilitized to their full capacity.

 

[gaikokujinkyofusho]

got it, thanks for the clarification!

Another semi-related question, speaking of WHS, has anyone tried using greyhole for linux? seems promising but perhaps not ready for primetime (or maybe it is?).

Cheers

-Gaiko