[plug] Advice wanted - come spend my money (vicariously)

[John McCabe-Dansted]

The only thing that seems odd to me is that you put  /home on  sdc1. Since
/home could contain irreplaceable data, wouldn't /tmp be a better choice?

> Now my dilemma is is there a better filesystem I could use instead of
XFS?

I don't think there is an objectively correct answer to that question. We
have an n40l and are thinking of putting everything on a single RAID10
formatted with ext4. This configuration would be better in the sense that
it would be faster and more reliable than RAID5, but would only provide 4TB
rather than 6TB. Unless you are doing some thing weird, either ext4 or XFS
would probably be fine, I think.

Some random comments:
 - putting a swap partition on each drive would improve swap performance
(though if any drive goes down you will have swap problems). This may also
spread the load so sdd won't die so fast, which could be a good or bad
thing depending on whether you want to use sdd as a canary.
- Putting some ssd cache in front of the raid array, even USB, could
improve performance. Of course if you are going to use writeback caching
you would probably want a raid1 for the SSD cache so you don't have a
single point of failure.
-  if you put the OS on a (perhaps cheap) SSD you may be able to leave RAID
powered down most of the time. This could reduce power consumption and rate
of failures.


On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Richard Meyer <meyerri at gardenshark.org>
wrote:

>
> Hi all
>
> I have one of those nice problems.
>
> I bought a "HP MicroServer G7 N54L AMD Dual Core 4GB ECC 4-Bay NAS
> Storage Server NO OS 1YRS" off Fleabay and have populated it with a
> small amount of storage and installed an OS -
>
>      1. 4 x 2TB Seagate disks - would have preferred Hitachi, but
>         they're difficult to get here
>      2. Installed Ubuntu server (14.04)
>
> disks are partitioned as follows -
>
>      1. 20GB clipped off the front of each disk (just to keep them
>         "similar")
>      2. sda1 and sdb1 are RAID 1, ext4 and contain /
>      3. sdc1 contains /home, ext4
>      4. sdd1 is swap space
>      5. sda2, sdb2, sdc2 and sdd2 are software RAID 5 formatted with XFS
>
> Now my dilemma is is there a better filesystem I could use instead of
> XFS?
>
> Since I haven't really got much going yet, now would be a good time to
> find out, before I have to move 5TB of pr0n around to reformat the
> disks.
>
> Can anyone suggest a better way of setting all this up?
>
>
> --
> Richard Meyer
>
> If my body is ever found on a jogging trail, just know
> I was murdered elsewhere and dumped there.
>
> Linux Counter user #306629
>
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>



-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
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