I have a SAS3 RAID card and a super cap. Think I'll play with it before I decide. How would you recommend configuring 24 drives in the same chassis? Thanks.
I'd do two RAID-6 volumes 12-wide. In this day and age you don't wanna do RAID-5. Start with one RAID-6 volume, the minimum disks needed for that would be 4x, I think. You'd lose half your storage at that point (and is no different than mirroring), but as you expand that array (and that's easy peasy), the parity overhead becomes less and less.
If at some point you just want a giant array that acts like a single disk, combine the two into a RAID-60. This is not that straight forward, but certainly doable, you just have to be a lil careful.
p.s. Yes, you need same size disks. That's one advantage of Drivepool that trumps RAID, but then...half your storage...welp.
p.p.s: I'm somewhat partial to Adaptec RAID cards, especially the "zq" variants that do SSD caching. You can
create a RAID array of SSDs to act like a cache...and it'll do it happily. The documentation on this is quite outdated and says that maxcache will only work with 512 sector HDDs, but that's not true. Adaptec released updated firmwares quite a while ago that removed this limitation and the cache works just fine with 4k sector HDDs.
