On 09/11/18 01:16, Dale wrote: > Howdy to all, > > I have a interesting problem coming up. Currently, I have two 3TB > drives for my /home mount point. A lot of this is videos but some pdf > files and other documents as well plus a photo collection of family > stuff etc. > > Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% > Mounted on > /dev/mapper/Home2-Home2 5.4T 3.7T 1.8T 68% /home > > I've got a little over 25% or so of usable space left. At that point or > shortly thereafter, it could start causing some issues according to what > I've read anyway. Either way, shortly after that, being full will > certainly be a issue. I'm full up on my motherboard SATA ports. Even > if I buy a larger drive or drives, I'd have to unplug one to move things > over and likely repeat that a few times. I could do that and likely > will have to anyway but I'm trying to think a little farther ahead. > Currently I have the more important stuff backed up to a external single > 6TB USB drive, previous thread on that. I'm trying to come up with a > plan that allows me to grow easier and without having to worry about > running out of motherboard based ports. > Rich's ideas sound good. I'm in a similar situation to you - I'm about to outgrow my existing 3TB setup, but I've got a new 4TB lined up waiting to go (if I can get it to POST).
Small consumer grade SATA expansions are about £35, you should be able to get a card that does port multiplier for that money, so that's 8 SATA drives on that card. Watch out - while I would recommend them, some cards are advertised as "2 SATA, 2 eSATA". That's only two ports, that can be jumper-switched between SATA or eSATA. Great for backup or disaster recovery as well as expansion. Then think about how you're going to lay your filesystem out. My system currently has three partitions (/, /var and /home). Mirrored (md raid 1) onto a second 3TB drive, giving me 6TB total. Actually, not very conducive to future expansion. The new system is going to have the bare-metal drives set up as one huge partition (actually not quite true - they'll be a 3TB and a 1TB for practical reasons). The 3TB partitions will be raided into a raid 5 with one of the old drives. The 1TB partitions will be raid 1 (system and home, basically). I'll then put lvm on the two raids before actually partitioning that to give me /, /home, and anything else I want. At this point, I can now replace any of the drives, grow my raid, my lvm, or my partitions, at any time and underneath a running system (okay, I don't have hotplug so I'd have to shut down the system to physically swap a drive over, but ...). And I'm thinking about btrfs, but the one thing you have to be really careful with that is snapshots running out of space. Cheers, Wol
