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
