Hi, Thank you for your detailed look at possible setups. I remembered my old setup incorrectly, though, so that I am not sure everything is applicable. My original (2016) setup included two hard disk drives of not 4 TB but 8 TB capacity in a RAID-1 that has reached 92 per cent capacity.
On Tue 2020-04-28 13.19.10, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
First for RAID, avoid SMR HDDs. (Shingled magnetic recording) I would probably RAID 5 them. 4+4 = 8 for the first disk, against the two other 8 disks. So, say disks are A(4TB), B(4TB), C(8TB), D(8TB) Partitions the 8TB in half. A(4TB), B(4TB), C1(4TB), C2(4TB), D1(4TB), D2(4TB) RAID 5: A,C1,D1 RAID 5: B,C2,D2 Then put the two RAID arrays in the same LVM VG, so that they look like one big disk for the OS. Another alternative is using XFS or BTRFS and configure them with replicas. That is where the filesystem does the replication, thus not needing RAID at all.
As 8 TB hard drives still seem to be the best value for money per TB, I have ordered two more, making sure they use perpendicular magnetic recording. The existing drives look fine both in SMART logs and tests (I even have a 1 TB from 2009 in perfect working order, cannot imagine how.), so my first idea was to create a new RAID-1 and to combine the two resulting systems via Logical Volume Management. What do you think?
Or, you could take the approach I take. I remove the old 4TB disks and only copy the few files I need on to the 8TB disks going forward. I can always plug the old 4TB disks in if I need an old file. I have written my own indexer for this. It scans the whole disk, creating an index and thumbnails and then only store the index and thumbnails on the 8TB disks. The index is stored in Elastic Search, so makes it easy to find the files again, and also which disk they are on. So, files I hardly ever need are stored on powered off disks.
Unfortunately, in my case, I cannot tell which data are going to be needed more often or sooner. Kind regards, Axel
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