can I mix Hard drives?

[liddley]

This maybe a daft question, but can I mix hard drive types in my nas4free system. I'm a complete Newbie at nas4free so am trying to experiment with an old Ausus intel core 2 duo machine I had in the cupboard before buying any new hardware for a nas.
Due to the age of the machine it only has 2 SATA ports on the motherboard so my question is can i add another 2 IDE drives into the mix on the old ribbon cable to extend my storage space or will mixing SATA and IDE drives not work?

[Snufkin]

You can even make them running well within single ZFS pool.

[raulfg3]

no problem on MIX, but understand how ZFS pools work
eg: if create a single ZFS Pool like Snufkin suggest, sizes of disk sums, because no redundancy is used, but if you create a RaidZ1 ZFS Pool, you use the size of the small disk for all the rest disk

[Snufkin]

...if you create a RaidZ1 ZFS Pool...

On low end hardware (like mine) suggest using ZFS mirror vdev's, even if HDD's are not exactly of the same size.
It's plain, simple and easy to replace/expand solution.

[liddley]

Thanks for reply guys, this means I can install another two drives I have in my spares bin.
Do I still need to set them as master and slave with the jumpers?

[Snufkin]

Do I still need to set them as master and slave with the jumpers?

Sure, jumpers must be properly set.
I prefer Cable select position to avoid mistakes in case failed IDE PATA HDD to be replaced.

[liddley]

Thanks for the info guys, Im going to get those two drives installed tomorrow and see how it works out.