Planning to replace my current storage setup, input appreciated.

216 Views 3 Replies 2 Participants Last post by parityboy, Mar 12, 2009

Spazghost

Discussion Starter · Mar 12, 2009

I remember when I bought my current storage, and told myself: 320GB will be enough, I'll never use all of that. Well unfortunately, I was wrong, and I'm very quickly running out of space, even more so that I've gotten more into photography. So, with my space running low, and with my drives beginning to get up there in age, I think it's time to replace my storage setup for something larger, but also something safe and robust that'll be relatively platform independent.

Currently my HDD setup is as follows:

2x 80GB Seagate drives in RAID 0, for my OS and programs
2x 320GB Seagate drives in RAID 1, for data

I went with a RAID 1 for my data storage because I wanted to have some fault tolerance to fall back on in event of a drive failure... and that's all good, but unfortunately it tends to make it a bit difficult to use outside of Windows. I'm not a big Linux user, but I'd like to start using Linux a bit more, mostly for development purposes. But at the same time I'd like to be able to access all my data from either operating system.

Here are some ideas I've come up with so far for my new setup:

1x 500GB Western Digital Cavilier Black
- This would be used to store all my OS partitions and programs. I'm avoiding a RAID 0 this time, because of the problems I had installing OS's other than windows... You'd think installing Ubuntu on a RAID 0 would be easy, but like I said before, not that much of a Linux guru so meh.
2x 1TB Western Digital Cavilier Black
- This would be used for data storage.
- This is also where I'm gonna have to make most of my decisions for planning, as I'm pretty set on using just 1 500GB HDD for all my OS partitions.
- For platform independency, I was thinking of formatting the drives in FAT32, but I've decided that I'm probably going to go with NTFS, since I can use ntfs-3g to get read/write compatability in Linux (link)
- As for actual setup... I could setup the 2 drives in a RAID 1, which would give me the fault tolerance I want however, that would require me to figure out how to mount the volume as a working RAID 1, in order to allow me to work with my data outside of Windows.
- An alternative that I am considering, would be to use an external enclosure for one of the TB drives, and an opensource file sync utility such as JFileSync or FreeFileSync to sync data between my interal drive, and the external backup. I'd have to do backups manually... but this would make my storage a bit more robust, as it would simplify accessing my data, and would also allow me to take my data with me without having to take apart my RAID.

Anyway, these are just some ideas going through my head right now. I'd appreciate some input though, especially from people who use an NTFS partition to store their data, and access it from Linux.

+Reps for input

See less See more

Save

1 - 4 of 4 Posts

parityboy

· #2 · Mar 12, 2009

After reading your post I have a couple ideas...

Data drive:

2x 1TB in RAID1 is a good start, and since Linux is more flexible than Windows, you could set up the RAID 1 on the on-board fakeraid controller. Format it for NTFS like you mused, and use the dm-RAID facility on Linux, combined with ntfs-3G to be able to mount and read the partitions from there.

OS drive:

Once you migrate your data from the 320GB RAID 1 to the 1TB RAID 1, why not split the 320s, and use one for Linux and one for Windows? After that, you could weave the 2 80GB drives into a RAID0 scratch drive, or as a swap space for Linux...

In fact, you could put the two 80GB drives into an external 2-bay enclosure and use them as a (smallish) data safe.

See less See more

Save

Reactions: 1

Spazghost

Discussion Starter · #3 · Mar 12, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by parityboy

In fact, you could put the two 80GB drives into an external 2-bay enclosure and use them as a (smallish) data safe.

I'm not familiar with the fakeraid controller... I have an EVGA 780i FTW which uses nVidia hardware raid

I'm assuming you know a bit about that though, seeing as your sig rig has linux and a Raid 1... so maybe you could elaborate a bit on that.

I didn't think about using the 2 320GB drives for my OS's but that's actually sounds like a good idea. I'll probably end up doing that then, +reps

See less See more

Save

parityboy

· #4 · Mar 12, 2009

Yes I use RAID 1, but I use the RAID mechanism that's built into Linux itself - it has nothing to do with any on-board RAID controllers.

In this world there are three types of RAID controllers:

1) Fully software RAID. This is what Linux uses and does not require any kind of special hardware support - all operations are performed by the host CPU. In fact anything that looks like a block device will do - IDE, SCSI, SATA, whether it's local to the machine or accessible across the Internet.

2) "Fake RAID". This is where the (cheap) RAID controller on your motherboard or an add-in card, lays the data out on the drive in its own format, but depends on the host CPU for calculations, depending on the RAID level.

3) Hardware RAID. These are expensive cards ($300 upwards), which layout the data on the disk in their own format and have a dedicated processor on the card for doing disk operations and RAID calculations. Generally speaking, the performance gap between these and Linux RAID is noticeable on reads and huge on writes. You get what you pay for.

The nVidia controller on your board is a "fake RAID" controller. You may wish to do some research to see if Linux supports it through dm-RAID. Be aware that dm-RAID is only for accessing the RAID partitions, it's not for creating the RAID in the first place - you do that in the BIOS.

EDIT: look here http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/...with_Fake-RAID

See less See more

Save

1 - 4 of 4 Posts

This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.

Top Contributors this Month