On May 27, 2014 6:39 PM, "Bob Sanders" <rsanders@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> Mark Knecht, mused, then expounded:
> > Hi all,
> >    The list is quiet. Please excuse me waking it up. (Or trying to...) ;-)
> >
> >    I'm at the point where I'm a few months from running out of disk
> > space on my RAID6 so I'm considering how to move forward. I thought
> > I'd check in here and get any ideas folks have. Thanks in advance.
> >
>
> Beware - if Adobe acroread is used, and you opt for a 3TB home
> directory, there is a chance it will not work.  Or more specifically,
> acroread is still 32-bit.  It's only something I've seen with the xfs
> filesystem.  And Adobe has ignored it for approx. 3yrs now.
>
> >    The system is a Gentoo 64-bit, mostly stable, using a i7-980x
> > Extreme Edition processor with 24GB DRAM. Large chassis, 6 removable
> > HD bays, room for 6 other drives, a large power supply.
> >
> >    The disk subsystem is a 1.4TB RAID6 built from five SATA2 500GB WD
> > RAID-Edition 3 drives. The RAID has not had a single glitch in the 4+
> > years I've used this machine.
> >
> >    Generally there are 4 classes of data on the RAID:
> >
> > 1) Gentoo (obviously), configs backed up every weekend. I plan to
> > rebuild from scratch using existing configs if there's a failure.
> > Being down for a couple of days is not an issue.
> > 2) VMs - about 300GB. Loaded every morning, stopped & saved every
> > night, backed up every weekend.
> > 3) Financial data - lots of it - stocks, futures, options, etc.
> > Performance requirements are pretty low. Backed up every weekend.
> > 4) Video files - backed up to a different location than items 1/2/3
> > whenever there are changes
> >
> >    After eclean-dist/eclean-pkg I'm down to about 80GB free and this
> > will fill up in 3-6 months so it's time to make some changes.
> >
> >    My thoughts:
> >
> > 1) Buy three (or even just two) 5400 RPM 3TB WD Red drives and go with
> > RAID1. This would use the internal SATA2 ports so it wouldn't be the
> > highest performance but likely a lot better than my SATA2 RAID6.
> >
> > 2) Buy two 7200 RPM 3TB WD Red drives and an LSI logic hardware RAID
> > controller. This would be SATA3 so probably way more performance than
> > I have now. MUCH more expensive though.
> >
>
> RAID 1 is fine, RAID 10 is better, but comsumes 4 drives and SATA ports.
>
> > 3) #1 + an SSD. I have an unused 120GB SSD so I could get another,
> > make a 2-disk RAID1, put Gentoo on that and everything else on the
> > newer 3TB drives. More complex, probably lower reliability and I'm not
> > sure I gain much.
> >
> >    Beyond this I need to talk file system types. I'm fat dumb and
> > happy with Ext4 and don't really relish dealing with new stuff but
> > now's the time to at least look.
> >
>
> If you change, do not use ZFS and possibly BTRFS if the system does not
> have ECC DRAM.  A single, unnoticed, ECC error can corrupt the data pool
> and be written to the file system, which effectively renders it corrupt
> without a way to recover.
>
> FWIW - a Synology DS414slim can hold 4 x 1TB WD Red NAS 2.5" drives and
> provide a boot of nfs or iSCSI to your VMs.  The downside is the NAS box
> and drives would go for a bit north of $636.  The upside is all your
> movies and VM files could move off your workstation and the workstation
> would still host the VMs via a mount of the NAS box.

+1 for the Synology NAS boxes, those things are awesome, fast, reliable, upgradable (if you buy a larger one), and the best value available for iSCSI attached VMs.

>
> >    Anyway, that's the basic outline. Any thoughts, ideas, corrections,
> > expansions, etc., I'm very interested in talking about.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Mark
> >
>
> --
> -
>
>