Gene Heskett wrote: > On Wednesday 28 July 2021 11:04:59 Dan Ritter wrote: > > The standard SATA interface is one port, one drive. (There are > > exceptions which are not worth talking about here.) If you can > > plug in a fairly cheap PCIe to SATA card, you can get 2 or 4 or > > 8 more connectors. > > > I have spares of both the very short slot and the longer slot, whatever > it is, this is an Asus Prime X370-A II motherboard, so name the > preferred poison for a new sata card. > > > Your choices for 4 drives are: > > > > RAID10: write 2 copies to four drives, read from all four; > > capacity is 2 drives worth. Survive any one drive failing and > > also survive two drives failing if they are on different > > stripes. > > > > RAID6: write one copy plus two sets of parity information to > > four drives, read from all four to reconstruct data. Speed is > > equivalent to one drive. You can survive any two drives failing. > > Raid6 sounds promising. Equivalent capacity is also one drive?
No, you actually get about 2 drives of capacity out of 4 here. > > All of these can be handled in software by the kernel, managed > > by mdadm. You can easily transfer the drives to some other Linux > > box. > > Name the poison card, and I'll get it and 4 more drives as this tower has > lots of empty drive space suitable for hiding SSD's. $20 for 2 ports: https://www.newegg.com/syba-sy-pex40039-sata-iii/p/N82E16816124045 $80 for 6 ports: https://www.newegg.com/p/14G-000G-00089?Item=14G-000G-00089 No drivers needed, kernel should just recognize them. Plug in the drives and read https://wiki.debian.org/SoftwareRAID You'll end up with something like --create /dev/md0 --level=6 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 Then mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0 and mount where you will. -dsr-