Can I mix disk cartridges of different sizes in my Premiere server?

On a Premiere system, RAID-K allows disk cartridges of different sizes to be mixed letting you take advantage of larger disk cartridges than those that were available when you purchased your system. Note that RAID-K protects your data by reserving as much disk space as is contained in your largest disk cartridge, and this space is not available for imports or downloads.

1U Server Example

When a 6TB Disk Cartridge is added to a 1U Server containing two 4TB Disk Cartridges, only 4TB of additional space becomes available for downloads and imports. The remaining 2TB of the new 6TB Disk Cartridge is reserved for parity to protect the content on any future disk cartridges. Should a second 6TB Disk Cartridge be added to the 1U Server, the full 6TB of this second disk cartridge would be available for downloads and imports.

Before:

• Disk 1: 4TB (content)
• Disk 2: 4TB (parity)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 4TB

• Disk 1: 4TB (content)
• Disk 2: 4TB (parity)
• Disk 3: 6TB (4TB for content and 2TB for parity)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 8TB

After adding one more 6TB Disk Cartridge:

• Disk 1: 4TB (content)
• Disk 2: 4TB (parity)
• Disk 3: 6TB (4TB for content and 2TB for parity)
• Disk 4: 6TB (content)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 14TB

With a 3U Server, the behavior is more complicated because of the hot spare disk cartridge. When a new disk cartridge is added to a 3U Server and it is the same size or larger than the current hot spare disk cartridge, the current hot spare will become part of the file system and the new disk cartridge will become the hot spare. If the new disk cartridge is smaller than the hot spare, then the new disk cartridge will become part of the file system and the hot spare will be unchanged.

Before:

• Disk 1: 2TB (content)
• Disk 2: 2TB (parity)
• Disk 3: 4TB (hot spare)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 2TB

After adding a 6TB Disk Cartridge:

• Disk 1: 2TB (content)
• Disk 2: 2TB (parity)
• Disk 3: 4TB (2TB for content and 2TB for parity)
• Disk 4: 6TB (hot spare)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 4TB

After adding one more 6TB Disk Cartridge:

• Disk 1: 2TB (content)
• Disk 2: 2TB (parity)
• Disk 3: 4TB (2TB for content and 2TB for parity)
• Disk 4: 6TB (4TB for content and 2TB for parity)
• Disk 5: 6TB (hot spare)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 8TB

After adding one more 6TB Disk Cartridge:

• Disk 1: 2TB (content)
• Disk 2: 2TB (parity)
• Disk 3: 4TB (2TB for content and 2TB for parity)
• Disk 4: 6TB (4TB for content and 2TB for parity)
• Disk 5: 6TB (content)
• Disk 6: 6TB (hot spare)
  
  Total Usable Storage: 14TB