[svlug] Lots o' disk space

[Chris Miller]

Skip Evans wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> A friend of mine does video for a living and has 
> amassed between 3 and 4 terabytes of data that 
> currently reside on a plethora of external drives 
> all over the place.
> 
> She'd like to put together a box to back it all up 
>   too, so I did some Googling around and came 
> across this article that makes it look pretty 
> painless and straightforward.
> 
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8590
> 
> (Can't go wrong with LJ, eh, Gridley?)
> 
> I have couple questions, though, before diving in.
> 
> 1) The article was written in 2005, so while I'm 
> sure the mechanics are still sound, I'm wondering 
> if the current crop of distros (I'm sweet on 
> Ubuntu these days), would make this set up even 
> easier?

Ubuntu, no.  Ubuntu isn't that hot on RAID.  It took me and a launchpad 
bug report to get NVIDIA NFORCE NVRAID to work on 8.10, and I'm not sure 
how software raid would work with Ubuntu.  I'm sure it could be made to 
work, but the whole reason of using Ubuntu is that it just sorta works 
without being told...

> For example, suppose you have a box with one of 
> these HBA cards mentioned in the article in it 
> connected to 4 1TB drives.
> 
> If you were to pop a CD of Ubuntu 8.04 into the CD 
> drive might it come up and say something like 
> "Boy, you've got a lot of drives in this thing? 
> Would you like to use them all?"
> 
> I certainly have no qualms about using fdisk and 
> mkfs like it says in the article, but I'm 
> wondering if the latest distros would find the 
> drives and do it all from the GUI install. Maybe 
> the Ubuntu Sever distro?

Open SuSE 10.1 found my RAID array and installed to it, and it also had 
facilities to create a software RAID array.  SuSE is fantastically 
horrible though, and I wouldn't recommend it.

> Also, does anyone have any advice on the HBA 
> cards? The article cites Promise Technologies, but 
> in looking around for information I found 
> recommendations for Tekram and Addonics as well.
> 
> Lastly, if the install is successful, and say 4 
> 1TB drives are all up and going, each on its own 
> mount point, would Samba be a viable option to 
> access them from an OS X machine for transferring 
> video files.
> 
> Any input, comments, and wisdom appreciated.

Network attached storage is the way to go.  Not a full machine, just as 
much space, more portable, less power consumption...  just a better way 
to go.