Making best use of 'spare' drives and Thunderbay enclosures - SoftRAID Features https://forums.softraid.com/softraid-features/making-best-use-of-spare-drives-and-thunderbay-enclosures/ SoftRAID Discussion Board en-US Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:40:06 +0000 wpForo 60 RE: Making best use of 'spare' drives and Thunderbay enclosures https://forums.softraid.com/softraid-features/making-best-use-of-spare-drives-and-thunderbay-enclosures/#post-8289 Sun, 21 Mar 2021 16:40:05 +0000 At least SoftRAID can tell you which drives are starting to fail. You can never have data stored on too many backup devices.

]]> SoftRAID Features SoftRAID Support https://forums.softraid.com/softraid-features/making-best-use-of-spare-drives-and-thunderbay-enclosures/#post-8289 Making best use of 'spare' drives and Thunderbay enclosures https://forums.softraid.com/softraid-features/making-best-use-of-spare-drives-and-thunderbay-enclosures/#post-8288 Sun, 21 Mar 2021 05:00:02 +0000 I've somehow accumulated a ton of drives. 4x4TB, 4x6TB and 4x8TB in 3 Thunderbay 4 (TB2 version) - some of these became 'spare' when I switched to using big external 12TB drives to 'backup' my main Thunderbay SR RAID5 volumes, instead using another SR voume. This was mainly to save space and just to tidy up. I have another empty NOS Thunderbay that I picked up over a year ago when I wanted a 'spare'. So I have 4 enclosures with 4,6 and 8 TB drives to fill them. 

For my sins, I also have two terrible Drobo drives - I wanted to them to use up my smaller 2 and 3TB drives in a working volume, but the Drobo set up has been very unreliable and slow. Maybe there's a incompatibility with having SR and Drobo on the same system.

You can't really mix drive sizes with SR5 right? So at best, I could use the 8X6TB to create a 1+0 24TB volume, over 2 Thunderbays.

The 4X4TB and 4x6TB could be 18 and 24TB RAID5 volumes I guess. LOL, I don't know what what I'm asking anymore. I guess basically how to make use of all these drives and enclosures. I guess they are effectively spares.

]]> SoftRAID Features chobochobo https://forums.softraid.com/softraid-features/making-best-use-of-spare-drives-and-thunderbay-enclosures/#post-8288