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question for tech-y storage people: I just nabbed 4 extra (used) disks with a 6 TB capacity from a place that re-sells electronics (oregonrecycles.com); I think they did some testing but obviously I dunno what to extent, and also, if it was just limited to stuff like SMART data, well...

anyway, I wanna RAID it, which is fine, but I don't know how much lifetime these have left on them. For four disks with unknown usage, should I use RAID6 or RAID10? It's not job critical data I'll be storing on these (mostly media and such). They'll eventually be migrated into a larger RAID array but that won't happen until I'm stable and can afford to rebuild my server so this is fine for now.

I wouldn't mind the better read/write performance that comes with RAID10 even though it has less parity. I suspect these disks were all used together so they might have similar wear/tear patterns; in that case, I'm wondering if RAID6's double parity actually buys me any extra life? Like, given 4 disks with the same history and a probably known disk failure rate, I'm not really clear as to whether double parity is going to make much of a difference (and that if one goes down, the others probably aren't too far behind).

#techPosting #raid #raid6 #raid10 #storage #nas