RAID types & chunks sizes for new NAS drives

[Ian Pilcher <arequipeno@gmail.com>]

I'm replacing the drives in my 5-bay NAS, and planning how I'm going to
divide them up.  My general plan is to create a matching set of
partitions on the drives, and then create RAID devices across the sets
of partitions, for example:

   md1:  /dev/sdb1  /dev/sdc1  /dev/sdd1  /dev/sde1  /dev/sdf1
   md2:  /dev/sdb2  /dev/sdc2  /dev/sdd2  /dev/sde2  /dev/sdf2
    ⋮         ⋮          ⋮          ⋮          ⋮          ⋮
   md16: /dev/sdb16 /dev/sdc16 /dev/sdd16 /dev/sde16 /dev/sdf16

This will give me the flexibility to create RAID devices of different
types, as well as maybe(?) reducing the "blast radius" if a particular
portion of a disk goes bad.

I believe that it makes sense to use at least 2 different RAID levels -
RAID-10 for "general" use and RAID-6 for media content.  Does this make
sense?

If so, does anyone have any thoughts or pointers on the chunk size,
particularly for RAID-10?  (I assume that RAID-6 will have similar
considerations to RAID-5, and so a large chunk size would make sense,
particularly for large media files.)

Any other thoughts?

Thanks!

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