> I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid

> I am not very experienced with home servers and such and was really disheartened by how much of my disk got eaten up by RAID. I was using the Synology Hybrid RAID which I think is similar to RAID 5. SHR1/2 is basically RAID 5/6 but with a mechanism for handling disks that have different sizes. Basically it breaks the disks up into partitions such that any "extra" space on other disks becomes part of another array which is only redundant within the disks that have that space. Anyways, SHR1 is 1 disk redundancy so you should see (disk_count * space_per_disk) - space_per_disk for an array where all the disks are the same size. SHR2 has 2 disk redundancy and I'm sure you can figure out the math for that. Are you not seeing the expected amount? For the record, I like synology. They keep updating old hardware for an incredibly long time. My parents have my old DS212j (release 11/2011) and it can run the latest DSM 6.