David Haller wrote:
Hello,
sorry it took me so long to reply.
On Tue, 12 Apr 2011, Per Jessen wrote:
I would probably make a number of RAID1 arrays of equal-size disks, then use LVM for managing the space.
RAID1 as underlying RAID-Level would be to wasteful for my data.
It's not only about the data, it's also about availability and uptime. Maybe that's irrelevant to you, I don't know. Never mind, if CHF100 for a 2nd 2Tb drive is too much, and you're happy with a restore of yesterdays backup to the new drive (once you've bought it), RAID1 is wasteful, I agree.
RAID5 would be nice if I could span volumes sanely across my (often changing) disks ...
"span volumes"? Changing disks is only a practical matter, plus the time it takes to rebuild the array after a change.
If I needed RAID6, I would have to do with the smallest disk-size, but otherwise I don't see a problem.
So, what'd you make out of:
[0:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD501LJ CR10 /dev/sda # .5T [1:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD204UI 1AQ1 /dev/sdb # 2T [2:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31500341AS CC1H /dev/sdc # 1.5T [3:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD203WI 1AN1 /dev/sdd # 2T [4:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD203WI 1AN1 /dev/sde # 2T [5:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD203WI 1AN1 /dev/sdf # 2T [8:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD204UI 1AQ1 /dev/sdg # 2T [9:0:0:0] disk ATA SAMSUNG HD204UI 1AQ1 /dev/sdh # 2Y [16:0:1:0] disk ATA WDC WD5000AVJB-6 05.0 /dev/sdi # .5T
I would create a RAID6 on sdb, sdd, sde, sdf, sdg, sdh. That would give you an 8Tb array with dual drive redundancy. With 2Tb drives, recovering after a drive failure can be quite slow, giving plenty of time for a 2nd drive to fail. Your Samsung drives are relatively cheap desktop drives, so likely to fail exactly when the warranty expires :-( Alternatively, if dual-drive redundancy is too wasteful, a RAID5 over the same drives would give you 10Tb. Then I would probably run a RAID1 on sda and sdi for system etc etc.
and that's rather recently, until a few months ago that was a merry mix of .5T, .75T, 1T, 1.5T and 2T ... Oh, and only /dev/sda (current system disk for a SUSE and a Gentoo), /dev/sdb (newest disk, prepped for 2 system-roots w/o home[1] to replace sda sometime), and /dev/sdg (one "home2" partition for basically replacable "home" stuff, one "data" partition). The rest is data partitions (one each disk). Oh, and expect disks being replaced by e.g. 3T drives soonish.
With a forever changing setup like that, LVM sounds like just what you need. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (9.6°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org