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 :-) :-)
