this is what i built for the house, it does pretty well, <a href="http://gcs8.org/san">gcs8.org/san</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 6:44 PM, Jim Kinney <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jim.kinney@gmail.com">jim.kinney@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5">On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 6:29 PM, Michael Trausch <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mike@trausch.us" target="_blank">mike@trausch.us</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>On 01/03/2012 04:52 PM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:<br>
> That confuses me. Does ZFS have built in redundancy of some sort<br>
> that would obviate the need for the underlying storage to be hardware<br>
> RAID? Or are you saying you'd use ZFS rather than Software RAID?<br>
<br>
</div>Both ZFS and btrfs have redundancy capabilities built-in that<br>
(allegedly!) play nicely with the filesystem's built-in dynamic resizing<br>
volume management stuff. Neither filesystem is "just" a filesystem, but<br>
aims to be a whole volume-management stack. No more need for things<br>
like LVM, when all you need to do is create an fs on a single whole<br>
drive (no partition table) and hot-add or hot-remove it from the pool of<br>
storage.<br>
<br>
The other nifty thing is that they can do redundant data storage on even<br>
a single device, as I understand it, so that you can do things like have<br>
the same data on a single drive in multiple locations, which helps if<br>
one area of the drive goes bad.<br>
<br>
I don't use hardware RAID for anything (and I'm not likely to ever do<br>
so). If I ever needed storage that went beyond what a few hard disks<br>
could provide, or something that needed to be larger than what I would<br>
trust something like ZFS or btrfs to do on their own, I would probably<br>
build a dedicated rack-mount box that had tens of drives in it and use<br>
something like RAID 10 with three stripes.<br>
<br>
There was a "DIY" guide to building such a box, along with lists of<br>
hardware and tools needed to build the things, and claiming something<br>
like 100+ TB of storage in a single box. They're expensive in absolute<br>
dollars, but relatively inexpensive compared to other solutions that<br>
scale that far up in storage space, and they are powered by Linux<br>
software RAID (AFAIK). You would use the things such that you could<br>
replace standalone failed drives off-line, and replace whole units in<br>
(ideally) only as long as it takes to power one down and install a new one.<br></blockquote></div></div><div><br><a href="http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/" target="_blank">http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/</a><br>
<br>45 drives in a 4U = 135TB (and a back brace!)<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">
<br>
I'm not anywhere near that, yet, though. I can only really forsee<br>
needing to grow to about 6 TB of reliable storage in the next two years,<br>
but given the high rates of change in everything around me at the<br>
moment, I can't really look much farther than that.<br>
<div><br>
--- Mike<br>
<br>
--<br>
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic<br>
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.<br>
</div> --- Carveth Read, “Logic”<br>
<br>
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<br></div></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>-- <br>-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br><br>As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
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