[svlug] Lots o' disk space

[James Sparenberg]

On Monday 29 September 2008 12:21:54 Brian De Smet wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 

<snip>

As for those who snipe at software raid.  I've been running 2 Centos4.x 
DB systems for about 2.5 years down Raid 5 .  One HDD failure.  24 x 7 
in a commercial environment.  RH installer makes it boringly simple .  
Insert disk create RAID partitions, install minimal OS.  Smile like a 
madman with the increased speed.  About 500GB (disk space) in each of 
the two databases. 

The largest array is a 4TB array over 16 SAN disks.   Here although it's 
hadware for each of the 2 "devices" that the SAN creates (it won't put 
all 16 disks in a single device.) I'm using a software LVM to combine 
the two. Hitches none.  Runs like mad.   (weekly there is a 0.5Tb data 
switch out on this array. Old data out new data in.) 

You might consider searching E-Bay for a used SAN, but personally AT 
home I'm going with home/smb nas units.  (Like Don suggested) Small 
quite and getting to where I can think more about my data than my 
server

My only complaint is that RHEL only does ext3 and ext2 out of the box.  
Honestly there are times when reiserfs or XFS would way out perform 
ext3 but doing a tweakers dance on ext3 makes it tolerable.

James