Greg Freemyer wrote:
fyi: This fileserver is for my company, not a customer, so I'm fairly cost conscious. On the other hand, having a bunch of partially full USB drives isn't very cost effective at this point.
So you would like a file-server with high redundancy levels, although not necessarily with high availability features (redundant power supplies, multi pathing). RAID6 is almost certain what you want, but you want to build it up gradually and without major investment up front. NetApp or Nexenta come to mind. Maybe 2nd hand. Hooked up to a plain PC. I don't quite understand your desire to alter RAID levels, but if it's about staging the cost, it can be done provided you have enough 3.5" slots. Get a drive array with 14 x 3.5" slots, and a suitable controller. (e.g. LSI, 3ware). Add a plain PC with openSUSE. Install one 10Tb disk, create PV1, add to VG, create LV, copy your data to it. When your wallet is up to it, add 2 more drives, use mdraid to create one RAID1, create PV2, add to VG, stop allocation on PV1, migrate to PV2. When your wallet is up to it again, add 2 more drives, use mdraid to create one RAID5 with the drive you free up, create PV3, add to VG, stop allocation on PV2, migrate to PV3. When your wallet is up to it again, add 2 more drives, use mdraid to create one RAID6 with the 2 drives you freed up, create PV4, add to VG, stop allocation on PV3, migrate to PV4. You now have 7 drives, 3 not in use, and a total of 20Tb storage in RAID6. You could add one more drive, create another RAID6 and then combine them into a RAID1, and you would have 4-drive redundancy. That takes up 8 slots, to move to bigger drives in the future, you could buy 6 x 12Tb drives, rinse, repeat. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (8.1°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - dedicated server rental in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org