<p dir="ltr">Software raid performance hit is tiny if you have decent CPU and chipset. The only benefit hardware raid has is battery backed write back cache.</p>
<p dir="ltr">That said, Dell built the box around that Perc chip. The toolchain for Linux that controls those perc cards are quite usefull. </p>
<p dir="ltr">LVM is the obvious choice for maximizing partition flexibility. Don't make all the physical space available at the beginning. It's easier to add to a partition than to shrink one first.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Filesystem choice is almost a religion. EXT4 is basic and flexible. Btrfs is the new darling. Zfs is hailed as the next best thing to clean air. XFS is great but can't be resized smaller.</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sep 23, 2015 11:44 PM, "Jeff Hubbs" <<a href="mailto:jhubbslist@att.net">jhubbslist@att.net</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
I am about to get "regifted" a Dell server at work which I am told
will have five 400GB SAS drives. I plan to turn this into a Gentoo
Linux server into which lab staff will shell to do whatever, and I
expect I may have a PostgreSQL instance running there as well.<br>
<br>
I'd like some suggestions as to the most admin-friendly way to deal
with the five drives given that:<br>
<ul>
<li>I really dislike hardware RAID cards like Dell PERC. If there
has to be one, I would much rather set it to JBOD mode and get
my RAIDing done some other way.</li>
<li>I foresee I will have gnashing of teeth if I set in stone at
install time the sizes of the /var and /home volumes. There's no
telling how much or how little space PostgreSQL might need in
the future and you know how GRAs are - give them disk space and
they'll take disk space. :)</li>
</ul>
<p>I can go kernel raid, I can go LVM if I have to, I can go btrfs
if I want to - or, you can talk me out of my PERC hate. I know
that at 5x400GB I could RAID5 that stack easily in hardware and
then use LVM or btrfs from there, but I wanted to see if anyone
had a suggestion as to how to proceed starting from JBOD that
would be about as easy to live with.<br>
</p>
</div>
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