I’ve played with many storage technologies at home, ZFS being one of my favs when it comes to performance. But i’ve been looking for something that suits a typical home environment where power usage and capacity is usually more important than performance. Thats where UNRAID has come in…
UNRAID give me these advantages;
- Different sized disks in a single pool (only requires largest disk as parity)
- Files are distributed over all the disks – so even if you lost more than a single drive you still still have some of your data. Note : with parity drive you can handle a single drive failing without loosing anything, sorta like RAID4 – non distributed parity.
- Power usage, since the files are stored on specific disks not all the disks need to power on to give you your file.
- Runs on a USB stick – no large operating system required.
- Crashplan module can be installed to provide backup options.