[Novalug] best hard disk setup for home file server?

[Bryan J Smith]

Know your data and accomodate.  The absolute #1 issue I run
into is because people don't know their data.  They want one
pile to throw their stuff into and wonder why their performance
tanks with such an approach.  You don't want a system to be down due to a fsck or corrupted filesystem when the issue
could have been more localized.

------Original Message------
From: James Ewing Cottrell 3rd
To: Richard Ertel
Cc: Bryan J. Smith
Cc: novalug-bounces at calypso2.tux.org
Cc: Novalug
Sent: Oct 16, 2009 13:05
Subject: Re: [Novalug] best hard disk setup for home file server?

Richard Ertel wrote:

> my struggle right now is trying to figure out how to have a good sized
> MD-RAID-5 array without the probability of it rebuilding all the time
> due to this error recovery business.

I don't like RAID-5 either. But you said you were storing movies, right?

And like Bryan, I don't like big partitions unless absolutely necessary.

Let's say you sliced each disk into 4 primary partitions and build four 
RAID-5 drives: for n in 1..4; md$n=raid5(sd{a,b,c,d}, $n);

Mount these as /data$n or similar.

So fill up each partition, and when it's full, mount it read only. You 
can switch to write mode with the mount -o remount,rw command and back 
again with mount -o remount,ro.

Even if writable, Don't Forget To Use NOATIME!

JIM


--  
Bryan J Smith - mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile