From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from lists.gentoo.org (pigeon.gentoo.org [208.92.234.80]) by finch.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E4F77138C9D for ; Tue, 28 Apr 2015 15:03:00 +0000 (UTC) Received: from pigeon.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with SMTP id BD529E0A10; Tue, 28 Apr 2015 15:02:44 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-ig0-f169.google.com (mail-ig0-f169.google.com [209.85.213.169]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by pigeon.gentoo.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B7C29E0951 for ; Tue, 28 Apr 2015 15:02:43 +0000 (UTC) Received: by igbhj9 with SMTP id hj9so23225406igb.1 for ; Tue, 28 Apr 2015 08:02:43 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20120113; h=mime-version:sender:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:subject :from:to:content-type; bh=BsvvsqBTJcfBj/1roVSBa9aPkf+9NFV3eHOntNXH3y0=; b=T5TqJnC2XJcQeN8HZqTyaiayaxycGgwTEsZMF8ZwTE4J48LgkUhiUoffOIxmFLljyY adlMHVvK4YyFeLc+NzvYUedgNkqodC5UMgOW/TMYlIRmEQGadDbmIXo1q2WbnOB+HXWU VJQtNutri3MJ36wA1MJExVQMf5YVy9ANBtzEiXqCoVI2z5DmZulqKKv9U/heU/R7NwSb cXeXaHIR7WZCmaZMnA4ub2G+vyBB4hjjBm+eiAJ2nnCxMNVTEgfnmhZ3db6kZT9fMGSS 0prNCu6eiUVLanil5YKz4T+lWv0ewH24/pEf0XdG+jTU7ExnZGdhg9lswJFiCXGGcpNE jNLg== Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Received: by 10.50.45.103 with SMTP id l7mr20854668igm.41.1430233363143; Tue, 28 Apr 2015 08:02:43 -0700 (PDT) Sender: freemanrich@gmail.com Received: by 10.107.48.66 with HTTP; Tue, 28 Apr 2015 08:02:43 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <553F474E.4040101@gmail.com> References: <553F474E.4040101@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 11:02:43 -0400 X-Google-Sender-Auth: zZRonF5cQ3FKd8bI5C4ZDedmbbM Message-ID: Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions From: Rich Freeman To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 X-Archives-Salt: 6dfc7c5a-94f3-4917-b48a-efdd3a879dda X-Archives-Hash: 544443ea3e86186c2fe3ba22a1a486fa On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 4:39 AM, Dale wrote: > > What do you guys, gals too, think about this? Just add a drive or buy a > larger drive and move things over? Or is this a six of one and half > dozen of the other thing? > Generally I buy drives at the sweet spot in cost/capacity, so that is about 3TB last time I checked (for spinning disks). I ALWAYS use RAID or full backups of some kind. RAID isn't really a substitute for backups, but I use it as such for low-priority data such as mythtv recordings or re-generatable data. Right now I'm running on mirrored btrfs with a full backup to ext4 (since btrfs is living dangerously). I'm actually getting tight on space and debating dropping the full backups for lower-priority data, which would free up a 3TB drive to add to the btrfs array. Long-term I'd prefer to move to raid5 which is much more efficient, but I wouldn't recommend doing that on btrfs yet - it is very immature. raid5 on mdadm and lvm with ext4 is very mature, and is probably your most space-efficient option with some level of redundancy. With large arrays having raid6 isn't a bad idea these days - it takes a lot of time to recover a failure. However, if you have a single drive today there is no way to add only a single disk and get both more space and redundancy at the same time. If you want more space and only want to buy one drive, then you're stuck with just simple lvm and if a drive fails you're going to lose a lot of stuff. -- Rich