[Scottish] Scottish Digest, Vol 349, Issue 1

[Roland Ward]

> Hey folks,
> before committing to anything, i thought i'd get some additional input. I
> need more storage on my home network, mostly media files, HD TV and movies
> eat up disk space very quickly.
> I currently have an HP microserver with a bunch of disks in, set up as
> RAID5, sharing files across the LAN with SMB and NFS, but i'm running low
> on space.  I just bought another microserver, since they are again on ?100
> cash back offer. I plan to fil that with disks also.
>
> Should i just set it up the same as the first, and point mount points etc
> to the new server from clients, or from the original server, making it
> relatively seamless to clients at the expense of some performance, or is
> there a better way of setting it up?
>
> Anyone got any pointers?
>
> Thanks

the important thing is to prioritise your data. If you've got Terrabytes
of TV maybe it doesn't need to be RAID at all! If you loose it (and lets
face it hard disks do have a reasonable life nowadays) then does it really
matter for a lot of this? Also maybe have one server with "long term"
storage that is usually switched off but can be switched on with WOL.
That's RAID1 or RAID5 and you use for family photos, archive etc.Then have
a big "scratch" server. This is JBOD storage that you use to chuck stuff
onto. you've got to ask yourself things like - "Do I need an ubuntu12.04
ISO" on RAID? It's handy to have locally but at the end of the day youi
can always download it again. Having two servers with different NFS or
CIFS mounts isn't really an issue. In a Windows world people are used to
having say a "T:" drive as an archive and a "H:" drive as a normal day to
day storage (F: for those of us who remember Netware!). If you spend a
little time pruning and being selective you actually find that some of
that "vital" stuff isn't so vital...





-- 
Roland Ward
Primitive Designs