my 2cents
having 4 drives i would suggest RAID5. raid5 gives a good blend between
performance and reliability. you get redundancy and an improvement in
filesystem performance.
you get 1.5TB + a redundant drive. rebuild speed on that size of array on
commodity hardware will be slow but livable. probably take a few hours to
rebuild. i have a 4 drive raid 5 on sata and seagate 400GB disks and a full
rebuild with %50 usage on the drives is about 2 hours though this was a test
and not as a result of a failure, im not sure that really matters though.
i would also suggest you use pure software raid on linux. decouples you
from any specific controller and your drives can be pulled and put in any
other linux setup to get the data if the machine crashes.
you have one other promissing option. ZFS. you would need to run
opensolaris or solaris or nexenta(ubuntu+opensolaris) to get this but it has
a ZRAID function similar to raid5 but with LVM built in so you have add
drives as you please. i seem to be the big ZFS tester on the mailing list
and i have had no problems. i also use the built in compression rather than
backuppc compression. additionally, you can remote replicate a ZFS volume.
i have just started exploring this option because of some comments on the
list here that rsync gets wacky at larger file counts and i currently
replicate my bakuppc system to a remote site with rsync.
with raid5 you cannot add drives to the array once built. if you add
another volume with LVM, it will not be redundant and that filesystem will
then require that drive to function so losing just 1 drive loses
everything! you would have to add a second raid5 and add that to your
volume group.
oh, one last thing. good luck :)
On Dec 5, 2007 6:08 AM, Mirco Piccin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> > I also have four 500 GB IDE hard disks. I'm wondering what you would
> > advise for the best way to configure them. I'm tempted to put them all
> > in one lvm volume so that I can have 2 TB of storage. This is also the
> > easiest for me to accomplish.
>
> I'd like to post here my experience.
> I assembly a small server (low power consumption and low noise) to backup
> about 30 pcs and 4 servers (mix of file server, mail server, application
> server).
>
> The OS is installed in a 1gb DOM (debian etch) and the space for the
> storage is located in sata disks; Initially i use 2 500gb sata disks in
> RAID1 and LVM.
> Then (after about 2 months) i add another 2 500GB sata disks (in RAID1)
> and extend original LVM.
>
> So now i have 1TB of total storage space.
> I choose this way because i did not know how many disks will be added to
> the BackupPC server (i have 2 sata channels on the motherboard plus 4 sata
> channels on a PCI card), and because sata disk is not so expensive.
>
> Using RAID1 and LVM for me means easy expansion capabilities.
>
> Hope my experience helps someone...
> Bye
>
> (...and sorry for my poor english)
>
>
>
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