> The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes.
First I've heard of the deprecation! I'm not sure the second part is true though. I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first. My OS/Scratch is mirrored 10tb drives, which didn't have the same issue. These were refurbs since I didn't want to break the bank on scratch space.
> I think in 10-15 years you will struggle to find anything to read a CD or DVD, like you would struggle now to read a Zip or floppy disk.
CD/DVD drives were wayyy more prolific than floppy drives. Personal computing exploded in the 90's when optical drives were the standard.
> The most durable and cheapest way to do long term of storage is to replicate your data on new media regularly
Yeah, basically where I'm at. My prior NAS, I went through a few sets of drives. The latest ones I didn't even wait until one of the drives crashed, I just swapped out the hardware once the drives hit 5 years of age. I'd love some backup solution where I can archive stuff, and just leave it for decades, hence MDISC.
The option to create software RAID 5 from disk management has been removed already from Windows 10 desktop (you are supposed to use windows storage space, but as I mentioned, it really sucks for RAID 5). I am sure Windows Server will follow at one point.
> I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first
Yeah you can create a RAID volume of the min size across all disks. And then you can probably even create another RAID volume with the rumps of the larger disks. But you end up with multiple volumes. More modern solutions (synology, windows storage space) allow you to create a single volume that spans all disks and utilises their whole capacity. Synology by creating a bunch of RAID 5 volumes behind the scene, then joining them with a RAID 0-like (don't think it's RAID, just some sort of virtual volume). Windows storage space by writing strips of your data randomly across all your disks (the number of columns is decorrelated from the number of disks), ensuring that every strip is at most on one disk for single parity.
First I've heard of the deprecation! I'm not sure the second part is true though. I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first. My OS/Scratch is mirrored 10tb drives, which didn't have the same issue. These were refurbs since I didn't want to break the bank on scratch space.
> I think in 10-15 years you will struggle to find anything to read a CD or DVD, like you would struggle now to read a Zip or floppy disk.
CD/DVD drives were wayyy more prolific than floppy drives. Personal computing exploded in the 90's when optical drives were the standard.
> The most durable and cheapest way to do long term of storage is to replicate your data on new media regularly
Yeah, basically where I'm at. My prior NAS, I went through a few sets of drives. The latest ones I didn't even wait until one of the drives crashed, I just swapped out the hardware once the drives hit 5 years of age. I'd love some backup solution where I can archive stuff, and just leave it for decades, hence MDISC.