Hello Aiden
On 26/1/20 11:34 am, Aidan Gauland wrote:
I want to set up a file server on my home LAN with just consumer-grade
hardware, and run Debian stable on it. For hardware, I am probably
going to get a refurbished mid-range tower with a four to six 3.5"
SATA drive capacity, and put WD Reds in it.
What I'm not sure of which filesystem to use. I could just use ext4
with RAID5 or RAID6 to get striping with some fault tolerance (i.e.
time to replace a failed drive without losing everything). ZFS looks
easier, but only if you're on BSD. btrfs sounds like ZFS for Linux,
but it appears to still be of beta quality, and I can't tell whether
it can yet do striping with parity. Any advice?
Here is my advice. Put the simplest and most used system on it you can.
Because when it blows up, and it WILL blow up at some stage, there is
plenty of advice and howtos etc on how to fix it. I've had disks that
rebuilt the array every boot. Upgrades that made the array vanish.
Weirdly failing hard drives. Online help is like gold at 1am in the
morning with a failed array.
I run mdraid in raid 6 on I think 6 3tb WD disks. On top on that I run
LVM2 to allocate out space to various clients or vms etc. 2 drives can
fail and I still have data.
Plan for a failed drive. Do you know how to replace a failed disk? Do
you have a spare port to put a new disk on? a power cable for it? Can
you identify which one of 6 has died? ( I write the last 4 digits of the
serial number where I can see it on the drive).
Also raid whatever is not a substitute for backups. Have another
computer or offsite for anything you CANNOT recreate or don't have the
time to. Movies you can get again, photos of your kids you cannot. .
Have something monitor your array, unless you get notification something
is wrong, you can't replace a drive if you don't know it has failed.
Regards,
Aidan Gauland
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