On 6/26/13, Brad Alexander <stor...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm going to be adding a 3TB drive to my fileserver, but I want to use LUKS > encryption. The fileserver is kinda long in the tooth, a 2.8GHz P4 with 2GB > of RAM.
Your mobo should be adequate, for just a home file server. > The machine has two drive slots, currently with an 80GB and a 1.5TB drive. > > What I was considering am using a 16GB thumb drive for the OS, then > encrypting and using the 1.5TB and 3TB for swap, /var, /tmp, and the rest > for data. Possibly reasonably if you add a USB3 card, use a USB3 thumb drive, and keep a duplicate backup for when someone stubs their toe on the thumb drive and your file server crashes to a halt :) > Toward that end, I have a few questions. > > * Is using a thumb drive for / and /usr a bad idea? Would it be better to > set up the 1.5 TB with two VGs, one for the OS and one for data? I say yes. You only need, for a fileserver, a few GiB partition - so give it 20GiB and you should be fine forever. Plug in USB thumb drive is physically fragile, as hinted above. > * Writing random data to the hard drive is going to take a *lot* of time. I > built a P4 box a while back with a 500GB drive, and as I recall, it took > somewhere around 40 hours to write random data to that drive...A 3TB will Your bus -> HDD xfer speed is higher I think, so it sounds like you were CPU bound. An email from the last few days talks about throughput of drives vs USB drive throughput etc. and expected times. > take something over a week by my estimation. I was considering processing > it on my Quad-core AMD machine, but will that be any faster? I'm guessing > it will, since the bus speed is faster. Sounds like it will be substantially faster, especially if you have a multi-threaded encrypter. > * If you have already randomized the drive and written encrypted data to it > (e.g. on the faster machine), is there a way to tell the installer that you > want an encrypted partition, but don't write random data to it? I think so. You might have to go for "advanced" install or something... Good luck, Zenaan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/caosgnsq_+vjwwd+kwje-dvglwnf6esv7frgihffjinswmnp...@mail.gmail.com
