On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 12:16 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 6:19 PM, Lew Wolfgang <wolfgang@sweet-haven.com> wrote:
On 11/18/2016 03:05 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
This email might be offtopic, not sure.
I have a minimum of 10 TB of data I want to consolidate off of multiple USB drives to free them up. The data is almost exclusively static and rarely accessed, but I need to maintain it.
I have 2 copies of this data in most cases currently, but it is spread around multiple USB3 drives. (I have dozens of them). The plan for now is just to consolidate one copy of the data.
I bought a 10 TB SATA drive to hold a first big chunk. I expect it will get filled quickly as I start to consolidate my backup copies, so I want to be able to grow the volume holding the data by adding disks to the pool and extending the volume.
I suspect I will also want to have more resiliency at some point. (ie. raid 0 => raid 5 => raid 6)
If I truly had confidence in this storage pool I might eliminate both copies of the data that is on USB drives currently. But even with raid 6, I think I would worry about a total LVM or Volume crash Or even a user error!
Even though I know LVM and MDraid somewhat, I don't know if is "dynamic" and "reliable" enough for what I want.
And advice out there?
Goals:
- Create a fileserver that I can add drives to from time to time and grow it's capacity. Probably 10TB drives so I don't have too many spindles in the mix. When bigger drives become available, I'd prefer to use them, so being stuck will all the same size drives is a negative.
- Performance is non-critical. I've used LTO-4 tapes to do this in the past, but I hope online is a better choice now. With LTO-4, once I had a new data set (typically 100GB - 2TB) I would make a backup with tape and put it away for the time I needed to ensure I still had it. (Often years).
- Share the exported volumes with Windows PCs. (Not critical, but preferred)
- have the ability to start the drive pool with a single drive and add to it over time
- Allow the added drive to be either as SATA USB3.1
- Allow the Raid "protection level" to be adjusted for a given volume from time to time.
=== I was actually planning to do this with Windows and its "Storage Spaces" solution. I just this afternoon put a new 10TB drive in a windows PC and added it to the "Storage Space" (like LVM).
But my reading says the "resilience level" of a volume has to be set at the time the volume is created. I can grow it later, but I can't change it from a raid 0, to a raid 1, to a raid 5, etc.
Hi Greg,
Why don't you try a Drobo?
All,
I went with a Drobo. I snagged a used 8-bay on eBay for under $200 including shipping.
In theory it can meet all my goals and that price is crazy low.
Greg
Got my Drobo today. So far I'm not impressed. Pros: I plugged in 8 1TB drives and it saw them and let me thin provision a 16TB volume. I pulled out one of the 1TB drives and popped in my 10TB drive. It recognized it and rebuilt my volume. The rebuild only took a minute or two, but I only have 6GB of data on the volume and it is thin provisioned, so not much data to move around. In the user's forum they say you can use large drives, but no single logical volume can be over 16TB. I can live with that. The main dashboard tool is available only for Mac / Win but they also have a Web Admin interface you can install. I haven't tried that yet. See https://myproducts.drobo.com/system/resources/85252/original/DroboApps_Insta... Regardless, you have to do the initial setup from a Windows / Mac PC. It has an iSCSI target feature. Cons: While I can ping the manually configured IP, I can't yet connect the management dashboard to that IP. (In theory firewall holes are open. I tried with both Mac and PC clients.) I haven't gotten the iSCSI interface to work yet. As a test, after putting in the 10TB drive I tried to create a second 16TB thin provisioned volume. It seemed to work, but has been sitting at "restarting drobo" for the last hour. == An eBay negative. This was advertized as a DroboPro NAS. There isn't such a product. I assumed the NAS nomenclature meant it was one of Drobo's fileserver products. It's not. This one is iSCSI / Firewire / USB-2. I hope I can get the iSCSI to work. Then I can connect it up to a server to share it out. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org