Hello Pieter, - Is it wise to create such a large disk pool and large virtual disk. With DDP you can have a larger number of drives and it doesn’t affect the performance as much as a traditional raid as all drives are being used & none are idle. Isn't the rebuild time to long? No the rebuild times will be faster than traditional raid. So in your setup of 4TB drives in a traditional raid your rebuild time would be more than 4+ days as with using DDP your rebuild time is on average less than half so it should take no more than 2 days, & could be done in 1 day. - Is it less risky to create 1 disk pool wit 2 virtual disks, or 2 disk pools and 2 virtual disks? You can create 1 DDP & have 2 virtual disk in the same pool, & the risk is about the same as having 2 virtual disks in the same traditional raid array. The difference is with traditional raid when you have 2 virtual disk in the same group you have a performance hit & longer rebuild times, but in DDP that is not the case as rebuild times are faster and performance is better as well. - will this 10% free capacity be used for rebuilding when the virtual disk is full? No the 10% is not used for rebuild. The 10% is the DDP reserve which is 10% of each physical disk in the pool. The usable space on any disk is the available space, minus the DDP reserve. Based on threshold settings, you will receive a warning as you encroach on the reserve.  - is 10% free capacity enough? Do I need more or can I take less? You need to have a minimum of 10% free space. If you have more space available then than the 10% then you can add more to the reserve but not less than 10% for the reserved.  Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Hi, I just bought a MD3200 with a MD1200. Inside are 22 disks of 4TB near line sas. Now i'm wondering which setup is the best for my purpose. I need storage capacity between 50TB and 60TB for video storage. The video editing will not be done on the storage, so performance is not the biggest issue. More important is safety of the data and usable space. So I think of making a setup with all the 22 disks in the disk pool (57,3TB usable space) and make 1 virtual disk with 90% of the disk space in the pool. So 10% is"free capacity" for rebuild purpose. This gives me a 51,5TB disk. My questions are:- Is it wise to create such a large disk pool and large virtual disk. Isn't the rebuild time to long?- Is it less risky to create 1 disk pool wit 2 virtual disks, or 2 disk pools and 2 virtual disks?- will this 10% free capacity be used for rebuilding when the virtual disk is full?- is 10% free capacity enough? Do I need more or can I take less? And a totally different idea: make in de MD3200 4 disk groups with 5 disks in raid5, make 4 disks and make put these together in Server 2012 in Microsoft Disk Management. I hope somebody can give me some hints for the best setup thnx, Pieter
best disk setup