Borg

Ya, that makes sense. Thanks :) That means that to reduce the amount of data that needs to be read in total one should always try to divide new data by all drives as equally as possible right?

You are talking about the snapraid idea for using multiple NAS right? Those times are perfectly acceptable. I intend to only add new data in accumulated batches. I have no problem if the sync afterwards takes a long time. I'll just regulate the interval at which new data is added based on how long it takes to sync the new data. I already have and will keep a fast but more space limited data storage for first stage backup storage with its own higher cost redundancy which is used for imediate storage...

Ya. Well, I have a tower with 14 drives where I'm also installing it. But what I'm building right now and the plans for growing are those cheap nas. I'm also wandering about how feasible it would be to run it inter-nas. Like, having it run on each nas so that each nas has some internal safety with its own parity drives. But for backup, I would like to try the following: Instead of having two identical nas mirroring each other for backup, I'm thinking about starting with 3 smaller ones and having...

I'm actually mostly talking about a sbc nas with usb disks so that is not a concern. It is always possible to add more disks easily. Or to just add another nas. They are cheap. Ya, performance is not great but its mostly not a consideration for this.

Eya, thanks for the answers (forgot to say that on my previous reply). Thing is, right now the best price per GB by far is for 3TB drives so that's what I'm buying right now. (I live in EU. Can find drives cheaper online but shipping charges ruin it.) I even took the power consumption of one larger drive vs multiple smaller ones and couldn't justify getting a larger one. The price difference is just too big. I'm not going to buy larger drives just to take advantage of the full space of those I already...

So I can have the parity of a 6TB drive into two 3TB drives? If I have an array with 1x 6TB + nx 3TB I can set 2x 3TB drives for parity and the 6TB drive will be protected. If I add a 3rd 3TB parity will that provide 2x parity protection for the other 3TB drives or will I always need 2x 3TB drives per parity from that point on?

So, I'm new to snapRAID. Still don't have it installed but I'm planning on using it on a new JBOD system. The thing is, I have one 6TB HD, several 4TB drives but most are 3TB. Will I be able to take full advantage of my drives and what is the best way of doing this? What I'm thinking is, if I put the 6TB drive and only use 3TB drives as data drives, would the 6TB be able to keep double parity and protect against the failure of two 3TB drives? (Obvious if one of the drives to fail was that 6TB one,...