| 1 |
Hi all, |
| 2 |
The list is quiet. Please excuse me waking it up. (Or trying to...) ;-) |
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
I'm at the point where I'm a few months from running out of disk |
| 5 |
space on my RAID6 so I'm considering how to move forward. I thought |
| 6 |
I'd check in here and get any ideas folks have. Thanks in advance. |
| 7 |
|
| 8 |
The system is a Gentoo 64-bit, mostly stable, using a i7-980x |
| 9 |
Extreme Edition processor with 24GB DRAM. Large chassis, 6 removable |
| 10 |
HD bays, room for 6 other drives, a large power supply. |
| 11 |
|
| 12 |
The disk subsystem is a 1.4TB RAID6 built from five SATA2 500GB WD |
| 13 |
RAID-Edition 3 drives. The RAID has not had a single glitch in the 4+ |
| 14 |
years I've used this machine. |
| 15 |
|
| 16 |
Generally there are 4 classes of data on the RAID: |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
1) Gentoo (obviously), configs backed up every weekend. I plan to |
| 19 |
rebuild from scratch using existing configs if there's a failure. |
| 20 |
Being down for a couple of days is not an issue. |
| 21 |
2) VMs - about 300GB. Loaded every morning, stopped & saved every |
| 22 |
night, backed up every weekend. |
| 23 |
3) Financial data - lots of it - stocks, futures, options, etc. |
| 24 |
Performance requirements are pretty low. Backed up every weekend. |
| 25 |
4) Video files - backed up to a different location than items 1/2/3 |
| 26 |
whenever there are changes |
| 27 |
|
| 28 |
After eclean-dist/eclean-pkg I'm down to about 80GB free and this |
| 29 |
will fill up in 3-6 months so it's time to make some changes. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
My thoughts: |
| 32 |
|
| 33 |
1) Buy three (or even just two) 5400 RPM 3TB WD Red drives and go with |
| 34 |
RAID1. This would use the internal SATA2 ports so it wouldn't be the |
| 35 |
highest performance but likely a lot better than my SATA2 RAID6. |
| 36 |
|
| 37 |
2) Buy two 7200 RPM 3TB WD Red drives and an LSI logic hardware RAID |
| 38 |
controller. This would be SATA3 so probably way more performance than |
| 39 |
I have now. MUCH more expensive though. |
| 40 |
|
| 41 |
3) #1 + an SSD. I have an unused 120GB SSD so I could get another, |
| 42 |
make a 2-disk RAID1, put Gentoo on that and everything else on the |
| 43 |
newer 3TB drives. More complex, probably lower reliability and I'm not |
| 44 |
sure I gain much. |
| 45 |
|
| 46 |
Beyond this I need to talk file system types. I'm fat dumb and |
| 47 |
happy with Ext4 and don't really relish dealing with new stuff but |
| 48 |
now's the time to at least look. |
| 49 |
|
| 50 |
Anyway, that's the basic outline. Any thoughts, ideas, corrections, |
| 51 |
expansions, etc., I'm very interested in talking about. |
| 52 |
|
| 53 |
Cheers, |
| 54 |
Mark |
Archives