Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions

[Dale]

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


I've considered RAID before.  For what I have here, doing regular
backups is enough, I hope.  Right now, I backup family pics from my
camera, documents and all the videos, which is a LOT.  If a drive were
to fail, at least I have the backups to go to and would lose little if
anything.  Since I backup pretty regular, I could still recover most
everything that may not have made it to backup. 

I'm on a limited income and this is just a home system.  One thing I try
to do is to find a good way forward first, then do something.  That way
I don't do something that costs money, realize I did it in a bad way and
then have to spend more money doing it again and have parts that I will
likely never need or use again.  I try to skip the worthless part when I
can.  ;-) 

That said, when I do get some drives and they are installed, I'll likely
be asking questions about btrfs, zfs, xfs and anything else that may
apply.  Currently I use LVM and ext4.  I like it pretty well but that
doesn't mean there can't be something better out there. 

Dale

:-)  :-)