The OS, as well as the swap partition, are on an SSD drive, therefore
using the SSD would be much faster.
Plus those disks will have enough to do having to keep the raid 6
array in sync... :-)

From what pretty much all of you have suggested, there shouldn't be
any changes in size with future disks I might purchase
but it's still best to leave a few MB just in case...

I will therefore leave 10MB at the end of each disk, pray for the best
and, in case it goes horribly wrong,
I'll blame all of you! Just kidding! LOL

Cheers,
Andrea

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Adam Goryachev
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, May 27, 2013 18:38, Andrea Bolandrina wrote:

quoted

Hi Tudor.

All disks I have report the same size, even though they are different
brand/model

Discussion on this list in the past would suggest the manufacturers have
agreed to make equal sized drives in future, so this shouldn't really be
an issue for 2TB drives or larger.

quoted

If the 2 WD RED bahave as they should I might buy some more as soon as
the others fail,
otherwise I will try something different (that's why I want to keep
the system as flexible as possible).

Why not just put a 2G swap partition at the end of each drive, if needed,
you can reduce the swap partition on the new drive if it is a bit smaller
than the rest, you have up to 2G of flexibility.... (or 1G etc..) This
means the space isn't wasted overall, but there is no issue if you need to
make it a bit smaller/larger/etc...

quoted

The 2 samsung SMART infos are already "screaming for help" and,
actually, a third Samsung already failed last year.
Terrible drives, terrible support from Samsung that replaced the drive
(still under warranty) with a refurbished one that failed within 10
days from arrival.

Personally, apart from a "batch" of WD Caviar Black drives that all failed
within a week, of had really good experience with them, and also the WD
RE4 drives.... I haven't yet tried the red, but would be interested to
hear how you go.

Regards,
Adam