New NAS build confusion with setting up drives for storeage

Operating System ZimaOS
1

Hi, an overview 1st.

Been using my HTPC with Emby server and Emby Theatre for quite a few years now but have finally got fed up with having internal 3x 3.5 drives and 2 usb drive caddy’s (a 2bay Icy box and a 5bay Terramaster) all a bit messy and built up and expanded over a number of years.

So i have decided to build a NAS for my movie and music collections and a place for my photos documents etc that i can then access from my various tablets (android) laptop, main PC’s and wife’s laptop.

I’m very used to building Windows PC’s etc but not a Linux based NAS.
For the NAS software been looking at ZimaOS as my NAS software, have discounted TrueNAS due the apparent restrictions on adding drives etc please correct me if I’ve misunderstood the way they have RAID with ZFS setup .

So using parts left over from previous pc builds i have the following
Motherboard: Gigabyte A520I-AC Mini ITX
CPU: AMD Ryzen 4 4500G
Memory: 32gig Kingston DDR4
NVME to 6 port SATA converter (as the MB only has 4x SATA ports)
Power supply: Dagger Pro 850 watt SFX (new purchase)
Case: Jonsbo N1 New purchase (takes 5 x 3.5 drives and 2.5 SSD)
Hard Drives: 3x Toshiba 18TB enterprise NAS drives New purchase (what on earth has happened to hard drive and memory prices recently! lets hope the wife doesn’t look at the bank statement his month)
Existing hard Drives all with movies and music on them
1 x 12TB HD
3 x 8TB HD’s
2 x 6TB HD’s
2 x 2TB HD’s (to be retired)
1 x 16TB HD used as a back up (now full)

The plan is to install the 3x 18TB, the 16TB and the 12TB hard drives in the Jonsbo case along with a 512gig SSD for the installation of ZimaOS

Have the 3x 8TB and the 2x 6TB drives in the Terramaster caddy as a JBOD set if possible

What i can’t decide is how to configure the 3x 18TB, the 1x 16TB and the 1x 12TB

Raid configurations don’t appear to let you use drives of different sizes or if they do then appears the total size is limited by the size of the smallest drive.
Have had a look at Snapraid and MergerFS as plugins but these don’t appear to be available plugins for ZimaOS at the moment or are there other options?

So looking for a bit of advice as to what to do.

Any help or suggestions gratefully received
Many thanks for reading
Keith W

2

Given your use case and plan to use various sized HDDs, ZimaOS might not be the best option. You might look into Unraid for more granular control. It offers more flexibility in adding/removing drives from arrays. You can set one or more parity disks and add multiple drives of various sizes to the array and assign each drive to specific shares and also control spin-down of individual drives. There’s a bit of a learning curve and it is not as cheap as Zima OS (or free as TrueNAS or OMV), but I find it makes a fine media server OS.