

How Do You Approach Multi-Disk Arrays? - markmcb

Every 4-5 years I upgrade my home server. This year I've shifted to some nice rack-mounted hardware.  At the core of my setup, I have two servers with 8 HDD bays each. One is the active box, and the other is local redundant storage (i.e., backup). Assuming 1 HDD is the system disk, how would you configure the other 7 HDDs to give you 1 massive storage volume in your favorite OS? Would you use the same approach on both the active and backup server?
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migrantgeek
It depends on what you value more. Do you want as much storage as possible and
not care about redundancy? Then RAID 0 or JBOD would give you a lot of space.
I wouldn't recommend it myself but it's an option.

If you care about redundancy but want a good amount of space, you can go with
a RAID 5. You'll lose some write performance especially if one of the drives
crashes but you won't lose anything.

I would recommend using 2 drives in a RAID 1 for OS and using the other 6 as a
RAID 10 for storage. You'll get good performance and redundancy for both
storage and the OS.

For a more specific recommendation, more data is needed about your needs.

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markmcb
Thanks. Yeah, I left it a little vague as to not sway any opinions. I
definitely want at least minimal redundancy on both arrays just to ease the
hassle of recovering from a disk failure. I guess I'm really trying to decide
if hardware RAID is the way to go, or if letting a fast disk controller hand
off the work to software (e.g., zfs) is a better option.

Anyway, I'm just curious to hear what others are doing especially given all
the "RAID is dying" talk that's popped up in the last few years.

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afics
I'd use zfs (consider freenas as your os, i like it) with raid-z3 (triple-
parity, thus 3 drives may fail w/o data loss) on the remaining 7 drives. You
then may use zfs snapshots + replication to the other machine or just use a
cron job to wol the backup machine and simply run rsync at a certain interval.

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markmcb
The zfs question is one I'm debating. I actually already use FreeNAS on the
backup server and it seems to be doing well. For the primary server I want an
OS I can do more with on, so I'd probably throw something like CentOS on it
and then run VMs for specific tasks or to use more bleeding edge
distributions. I suppose I could try zfs in Linux.

