The setup is intended for a home lab. “Just throw more money at it and buy bigger HDDs” is not an option.
Are there any fundamental technical objections to this setup? The goal is to use HDDs of different sizes in a RAID 5-like array without significant loss of space.
Planned approach:
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Create partitions of identical size on all data carriers (e.g., 1 TB chunks) so that additional hard drives with unknown capacity can be integrated later.
Are there any recommendations or empirical values for a reasonable chunk size? -
Combine the partitions of equal size into RAID devices (RAID 5) using mdadm.
- Optional: Encrypt the resulting MD devices using LUKS (cryptsetup).
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Integrate the (decrypted) RAID devices as physical volumes (PV) in LVM, create a volume group (VG) from them, and create logically appropriate logical volumes (LV) on them.
