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On 11/11/2018 00:45, Dale wrote: |
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> This is a lot to think on. Money wise, and maybe even expansion wise, I |
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> may go with the PCI SATA cards and add drives inside my case. I have |
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> plenty of power supply since it pulls at most 200 watts and I think my |
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> P/S is like 700 or 800 watts. I can also add a external SATA card or |
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> another USB drive to do backups with as well. At some point tho, I may |
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> have to build one of those little tiny systems that is basically nothing |
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> but SATA drive controllers and ethernet enabled. Have that sitting in a |
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> closet somewhere running some small OS. I can always just move the |
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> drives from my system to it if needed. |
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https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/What_is_RAID_and_why_should_you_want_it%3F |
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(disclaimer - I wrote it :-) |
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You've got a bunch of questions to ask yourself. Is this an amateur |
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setup (sounds a bit like it in that it appears to be a home server) or |
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is it a professional "money no object" setup. |
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Either way, if you spend good money on good disks (WD Red, Seagate |
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Ironwolf, etc) then most of your investment will be good to re-purpose. |
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My current 3TB drives are Barracudas - not a good idea for a |
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fault-tolerant system - which is why the replacements are Ironwolves. |
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Then, as that web-page makes clear, do you want your raid/volume |
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management to be separate from your filesystem - mdraid/lvm under ext4 - |
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or do you want a filesystem that is hardware-aware like zfs or xfs, or |
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do you want something like btrfs which tries to be the latter, but is |
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better used as the former. |
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One thing to seriously watch out for - many filesystems are aware of the |
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underlying layer even when you don't expect it. Not sure which |
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filesystem it is but I remember an email discussion where the filesystem |
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was aware it was running over mdraid and balanced itself for the |
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underlying disks. The filesystem developer didn't realise that mdraid |
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can add and remove disks so the underlying structure can change, and the |
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recommendation was "once you've set up the raid, if you want to grow |
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your space move it to a new raid". |
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At the end of the day, there is no perfect answer, and you need to ask |
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yourself what you are trying to achieve, and what you can afford. |
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Cheers, |
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Wol |
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