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<div style="direction: ltr;font-family: Tahoma;color: #000000;font-size: 10pt;">First of all, I would DEFINITELY do the hardware RAID. I have exactly the reverse feeling - one of the reasons I hesitate on using FreeNAS is that they want to handle the RAID.
To ease your fears, I am the primary Linux System Engineer at The University of Alabama - I also work a lot with the central virtualization environment (the the tune of 800+ virtual machines). We are using Dell hardware, and PERC on all systems. We have
no server systems without hardware RAID. They function beautifully. I would suggest a RAID 5, with a big btrfs "/". You can handle everything you need to do with subvolumes.<br>
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<div style="font-family:Tahoma; font-size:13px">--<br>
Allen Beddingfield<br>
Systems Engineer<br>
The University of Alabama<br>
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<div style="direction: ltr;" id="divRpF430725"><font face="Tahoma" color="#000000" size="2"><b>From:</b> ale-bounces@ale.org [ale-bounces@ale.org] on behalf of Jeff Hubbs [jhubbslist@att.net]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, September 23, 2015 10:42 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [ale] Needing to cut up server disk space<br>
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<div>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>
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