Important: Stay away from HDDs that use SMR (shingled magnetic recording)

Not a question ;-). Just letting you know that these types of drives use a different method for writing data that is not conducive to good performance in RAID-based storage solutions. It is for this reason that we actively detect and alert users to the presence of these drives and discourage their use in HexOS.

What kind of drives should I use with HexOS?

When selecting storage devices for use in HexOS, there are a few things to consider. Generally speaking, you want your drives in a single pool to be the same type, size, and speed to ensure maximum performance and space efficiency.

Type (HDD vs. SSD)

HDDs should be used for general purpose file storage and bulk data (your pictures, videos, audio, etc.). HDDs require more power, but also are more cost effective per TB.

SSDs should be used for high-performance needs such as video editing, virtual machines, or applications like media servers. SSDs require less power, but are more expensive per TB.

Size

Devices in a single storage pool are size-limited by the size of the smallest disk in that pool. Commingling devices of different sizes is currently limited in HexOS to prevent excessively wasting storage capacity.

Speed

Similar to capacity, the performance of your storage pools are generally limited by the slowest devices in each pool. If you mix and match slower and faster hard drives, your performance will be bottlenecked to that of the slower drives. Speed is generally determined by the RPMs of the device (e.g. 5400, 7200, 10,000, etc.) along with the type of interface being used (e.g. SATA, SAS, etc.).

The same applies to SSDs, though the benefits of the performance differences may be negligible for most users. For example, while most SATA-based SSDs can easily reach between 500-600MB/s read and write speeds, NVMe-based SSDs can get into the 1,000MB/s range very easily. However, for most self-hosted applications in the home, this difference in performance is less valuable than the benefit of commingling those devices into the same storage pool. TL;DR: Go ahead and mix your NVMe and SATA SSDs together in a single pool (unless you have a very specific high-performance need that justifies separating them).

Are SSDs required?

SSDs are highly beneficial to the performance of applications and virtual machines. While not required, applications loaded onto HDD-based pools may perform slower. For example, when browsing your media library in a media server apps, things like the poster art, theme music, and other metadata may not appear as fast as you are scrolling through the app.

If you start a system with HexOS without SSDs and wish to add SSDs later, there will be a process for migrating your applications to the faster storage pool in the future. For now, you may post in the forum for manual steps to perform this migration function.

More Storage Questions?

If you have more questions regarding storage and drives, please consider posting in our forums!