[Novalug] best hard disk setup for home file server?

Richard Ertel richard.ertel@gmail.com
Thu Oct 15 10:52:48 EDT 2009


anyone have any good howtos about doing mirroring+striping on 2 drives
with LVM2? best i found is the lvcreate man page, which indicates
using the switches "--stripes 2" and "--mirrors 1". just wanna make
sure that's all i need to know.

also, opinions of MD vs LVM2 for mirroring+striping on 2 drives?

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 05:16,  <covici@ccs.covici.com> wrote:
> It looks like the Vantek does not have a fan -- unless you are going to
> use for just a few minutes I would not use such a thing.
>
> Ken Kauffman <kkauffman@headfog.com> wrote:
>
>> Ironically, I bought a "raid edition" 750Gb drive.  It is the only
>> drive that failed on me within 5 days of buying it.  My green drives
>> have given me no problem since April of this year in a RAID-5 FreeNAS
>> configuration.
>>
>> Oh... those SATA/IDE to USB ninja kits have helped me more times than
>> I can think.  I recommend them to anyone on list.  I have a Vantec
>> one.
>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002
>>
>> K
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 14:57, Richard Ertel <richard.ertel@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > it certainly seems to me that the current breed of large-capacity 3.5"
>> > drives all have terrible reliability. and further looking into the
>> > affordable ones (WD Caviar Greens, for example), they don't seem to be
>> > appropriate for RAID arrays, on account of TLER or something.
>> >
>> > looks like if i want a reliable 3.5" drive, i'd need to get a "raid
>> > edition" drive, which come at a price premium.
>> >
>> > or i could get 2.5" drives, which also come at a premium.
>> >
>> > the bad news is that i'm unable to come up with the best solution,
>> > balancing money with needs.
>> >
>> > the good news is that i managed to get my server's raid array up and
>> > am currently rsync'ing from it to the backup. i put one of the wacky
>> > drives on a SATA-to-USB adapter (for experimental reasons) and turned
>> > off all cron jobs that may write to the array. it's been running for
>> > over 7 hours now. that being said, i'm definitely not putting it back
>> > into service in it's current state, but feel better now that i can
>> > mount the backup over NFS and re-map some symlinks to get everything
>> > working for the time being.
>> >
>> > On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 20:50, Bryan J Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org> wrote:
>> >> On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 18:23 -0400, Richard Ertel wrote:
>> >>> unfortunately i don't really have time to wait.
>> >>
>> >> I wasn't trying to push you in a direction.  I was just trying to warn
>> >> you about USB drives and said if you really want portability, try
>> >> hot-swap 2.5" drives, giving my own experiences.
>> >>
>> >>> having an operational server is high priority for me
>> >>
>> >> You could still use 3.5" drives for the time being, and then transition
>> >> later on.  pvmove works well for LVM.
>> >>
>> >>> that being said, i'll probably just buy four of these:
>> >>> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314
>> >>> unless anyone can suggest a reason why this drive sucks, for example :)
>> >>
>> >> Ouch.  That's quite pricey for 500GB in 2.5".  The Seagate Momentus
>> >> 5400.6 500GB was just $85 last week at NewEgg, and has been $70.  Again,
>> >> I paid $90 for it back in December of last year.  Western Digital has
>> >> been similar and Hitachi has their Travelstars on sale regularly at
>> >> ZipZoomFly with Rebates (and they are quick, 4-5 week turn-around on
>> >> them -- I've done them 4 times for a dozen disks now).
>> >>
>> >> I wouldn't push yourself to buy right now.  Wait for a deal.  Use 3.5"
>> >> drives in the time being and transition as time allows.  Again, I wasn't
>> >> trying to push you towards a decision overnight.  I was more worried
>> >> about you using external USB drives.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Bryan J  Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
>> >> Linked Profile:       http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
>> >> --------------------------------------------------------
>> >> Only engineers can solve the growing needs of consumers
>> >> Stop being "aware" (that's so '70s) and start supporting
>> >> real solutions that actually work and sustain the planet
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
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>> >
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>
> --
> Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> How do
> you spend it?
>
>         John Covici
>         covici@ccs.covici.com
>



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