Most of my unRAID gear has been free over the years, so while I'd love to spend thousands on a super dense micro server with 10TB disks, that's just not something I've ever been able to prioritize in the budget. But since I work in IT and datacenter environments, I do manage to get some fun stuff to play with.
Most recently, it was a bunch of "Aberdeen" storage servers - a mix of 48+2, 24, and 16 bay servers all full with circa 2010 compute resources and RAID controllers. They also came populated with 2tb drives of varying ages, about 160 in total.
I've moved my current 16 drive unRAID build into one of the 48 bay enclosures - it's a mix of 6tb, 5tb, 4tb, 3tb, and 2tb, drives totalling 56TB of array space. I've decided to leave a bunch of bays empty since I'm only at 50% utilization, but I'd like to slowly move to 10TB disks and this will give me the space to either replace existing drives or add to the array without worrying about enclosure limits. I hate the thought of throwing a 10TB disk into the parity slot, however, so I've instead got 12x 2tb drives running in the bottom of the chassis in RAID10. This presents to unRAID as 12tb and gives me plenty of overhead for whatever sizes the 10TB drives happen to show up with. These 2tb disks are old, and they're going to fail.. but I have about 140 sitting and waiting as hot spares ready to pop in and automatically rebuild on the HW controller.
This actually happened a couple of weeks ago - 2 drives failed. I replaced them and the RAID10 rebuild was completed in just a couple of hours. unRAID was none the wiser and so I didn't have to worry about a parity rebuild on the 12TB virtual disk, which is about 22 hours.
I've seen some old threads about this, but most seem to be abandoned and full of people chiming in with how stupid it is. I could understand some arguments against going out and purchasing a bunch of hardware to make this setup, but when it's just sitting in my lap available for use? So far, it's been fairly solid. Anyone else doing anything remotely similar with hardware RAID and virtual disk presentations?