DrivePool & SnapRAID, do I select DrivePool drive or mounted folders ?

[Zammo]

I am brand new to all this. Just downloaded both DrivePool and SnapRAID. I have removed my hard drive letters (6 different drives) in Disk Management after making a large virtual pool drive in DrivePool. I now want to create a single Parity drive. So with SnapRAID do I select just the DrivePool drive (which I doubt, given I won't have a parity drive big enough) or do I point it to the drive folders with my MountedDrives folder (where I have placed all my hard drive mounts) ? If so, is that directly at the root folder or the hidden DrivePool folder ? I am using Elucidate to GUI SnapRAID (given how much of a layman newbie I am).

Also my biggest drive is 8TB, I want to use that size for parity, I also have 2x 8TB archive drives in the pool (so 3x 8TB in total), do I need to slightly reduce the partition on my two 8TB drives or will this not be needed ? I just wasn't sure if the parity drive data has overheads that needs slightly more than the biggest drive in the pool. 

Thanks for any help. 

[Shane]

Hi, if you're not using drive letters I'd imagine you'd point SnapRAID at the individual hidden drive folders that make up the pool, and you'd want to dedicate (one of) the biggest drive(s) entirely to parity. You shouldn't need to shrink the partitions on the other drives.

Remember to turn off automatic balancing on DrivePool to reduce SnapRAID's workload.

[Zammo]

Thanks Shane. Do I keep the parity drive out of the drive pool or does it not matter ? So for instance, if I have 5 drives mounted to folders for Drive Pool, and 1 parity drive, should I keep that separate and out of the pool, or can I also mount to folder that drive too ?  

[Shane]

You should keep the parity drive completely separate. Using it for anything else risks the space usable for parity data becoming less than the space used for content data on one of the protected drives. Don't add it to the pool.

EDIT: Though if you mean "can I mount the parity drive as a folder rather than using a drive letter", if SnapRAID lets you do that then sure. You just don't want to use the parity drive for anything except parity data.