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Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).

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superboyac:
OK, so far so good.  I built it, it starts up, no problem.  Now, I'm already being psychologically hit by the number of drives I need because of all the redundancies.  On one hand, i want to say screw the redundancies, but I learned my lesson on that 15 years ago when I lost some data I thought I'd never lose because of those damned deathstars from hitachi.  So I'm sticking to the plan!

So here's my experience with storage spaces so far.  With storage spaces (and probably other similar systems, this is my first time with them) there's a hierarchy to the storage organization.  it works like this:
bunch of physical disks --> storage pools --> virtual disks --> (volumes?)

I don't get the volumes, I don't know if I need them.  I guess I do, I'll find out.
My plan is to create two pools...one for the live, working files...and another pool strictly to backup the first one.  Within each pool, I'm going to use the mirroring option in storage spaces.  So this halves my drive capacity.  And since I'm backing the pool up, I'm essentially quartering my usable physical disk space.  Which is annoying since I'm now quadrupling my cost!!

So I initially thought I had plenty of space and drives, and I guess now I feel I'm quickly running out.  I think I mentally was prepared for one level of redundancy, not two.  Oh well.

i wasn't planning on getting an additional expansion card for more sata ports, but I may have to now.  The 8 ports on the motherboard are full.

Shades:
Or you could buy 7 of those 8TByte drives (I am not sure if you can use those to boot from) and a 3TByte boot disk. That would leave you with 59TByte of storage space. That should cover your needs...for a while at least.

If that is not an option, you might consider to differentiate between data you want to keep and data you need direct access to. Direct accessible data is the data you need to store on your server, the other data could be on a NAS, a cloud, a set of (portable) hard disks or DEV/NULL...the only storage facility that dwarfs all the clouds combined! SpoilerJust don't expect to retrieve anything :P

superboyac:
Or you could buy 7 of those 8TByte drives (I am not sure if you can use those to boot from) and a 3TByte boot disk. That would leave you with 59TByte of storage space. That should cover your needs...for a while at least.

If that is not an option, you might consider to differentiate between data you want to keep and data you need direct access to. Direct accessible data is the data you need to store on your server, the other data could be on a NAS, a cloud, a set of (portable) hard disks or DEV/NULL...the only storage facility that dwarfs all the clouds combined!
-Shades (February 18, 2015, 07:30 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yea, I think you are right.  One of the reasons for the server was to consolidate all the stuff I have lying around on spare drives, dvds, cds, external drives.  They're not terribly important, probably mostly disposable, but that was the plan.

I'm keeping an eye out on those huge hard drive sales.  Let me know if there's a good deal!

superboyac:
OK, so I've now been able to test some things.
I'm running the storage spaces on mirrored mode, which is like raid5.  the other modes are simple (raid0) and parity (not recommended yet because it is so slow).

I was expecting to get speeds close to 100MB/s.  I am not.  I am getting somewhere around 50MB/s avg, and for transfers of a bunch of tiny files (pictures, tiny db files), it's even slower, maybe like 10-20MB/s avg.
If I just use an esata port on a normal computer (not this server), I can get about 80 MB/s avg, but that's also not mirrored or anything, just moving stuff to an external hard drive.

My immediate thought was to ditch this and instead use a ZFS setup, since there is a lot of evidence that zfs is fast and efficient with this kind of thing.  But, setting up the disks and pools with storage spaces was so nice and easy, I'd still like to give it a shot.  I also don't know if there are other tweaks I can try, and I don't know how much faster ZFS will be.  If I only get 10 MB/s increase in speed, I don't know if I care so much.

So that's where I'm at currently.  I'm debating storage spaces vs. ZFS.

Shades:
When you add mirroring, your file-system will generate more overhead. Simply stated, you sacrifice speed for stability. Doesn't matter which file-system and/or RAID setup you use.

Also, verify the health of the disks in your storage pool(s). It is possible that one of your disks is generating a lot of interrupts, dragging the speed of all other drives down.

There is still a long shot (especially with older drives): drive alignment. Any partition management tool (Minitool has freeware for this) can verify this for you and allows you to align one or more partitions. If the partitions id filled with lots of data, this will take quite some time (hours). An empty partition is aligned within seconds. This really matters if disk I/O is of significance to you.

If you want speed, having a trustworthy backup strategy in place for your data and turning off any mirroring functionality is your best bet.

And if you are not comfortable with that, then your backup strategy isn't as trustworthy as you think ;)

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