Re: [gentoo-amd64] Soliciting new RAID ideas

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 3:39 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.
>

acroread isn't critical to me but it does get used now and then so
thanks for the heads-up.

<SNIP>
>
> RAID 1 is fine, RAID 10 is better, but comsumes 4 drives and SATA ports.

Humm...I suppose I might consider building a 4-drive 1TB RAID10 from
my existing 500GB RE3 drives, and then buy a couple of 2TB Red drives
and do a RAID1 for data storage. If I did that I'd end up with 6
drives in the box, 4 of them old, but old ain't necessarily bad. ;-)
However that forces me to manage what data goes where instead of just
a big, flat RAID1 which is going to be easy to live with. Still, it
would probably save some money.

<SNIP>
>
> 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.

Thanks. No ECC and no real interest in doing anything very exotic.

>
> 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.
>

NAS is an interesting idea. I'll do a little study but my initial
feeling is that it's more money than I really want to spend. Summer's
coming. Time for Margaritas!

Thanks,
Mark