On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 1:13 AM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

This.

Thinking into the future is important - drives tend to fill up faster when
you have more free space available.
Get three drives if possible, go RAID5, then when you run out of space (you
will), you just add one more and you're happy again.

This setup has one more advantage: You get to keep your old drives and
re-use them.

One interesting idea would be to use 3 of your old drives in a RAID5 setup
for Gentoo. It wouldn't be as fast as a couple of SSDs, but you're already
used to the speed and you instantly get two backup drives just in case one
of the old drives fails. You could also use the spare space on this array
for backups of critical stuff from the main raid.

You can always switch to SSDs for main system later :)


>
>    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.


New tech is nice, but I'd stick with ext4. Data is one of the few things on
my systems that I don't like to toy with.

Cheers,
-- 
Alex Alexander
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