Ryan - From someone who has been bitten before: Beware RAID-5 rebuilding times! With N drives in R5, you can lose 1. If you lose a second during the rebuild, it's time to take the whole thing down and restore from backup. Since rebuild time is proportional to the size of the array and because hard drives are getting lots bigger without getting much faster, that rebuild time could be a lot longer than you expect. I've sworn off of RAID-5. RAID-10 or RAID-6 or just pairs of RAID-1 with LVM on top of it are all safer than 5. (Hmm - can anyone take a swing at characterizing the performance of RAID-10 vs. RAID-1 with LVM on top of it?) You mention adding 2, then 2 more. That gets my count to 6 drives. You said you have 4 bays. I would NOT run RAID over USB. (Yes, you can and I've done it to play with. Under load, I got enough random disconnects and errors that I wouldn't put it into production. ) Do you have enough SATA ports, physical space and cooling capacity to handle 6 drives? You mentioned that speed is not a concern. If you don't need the space now that 6 drives would provide, you might consider only using 4 and then doing this dance again with 4 TB drives in future. Andrew may have been driving at putting your boot device on another, smaller volume. I have a server that is stuffed with 2 TB drives, but the OS lives on a very small USB thumb drive. It barely touches it after the initial boot and lets me use the server's bays for "real" disc space. Just some thoughts. Thomas On May 1, 2012, at 12:27 AM, Ryan Coleman <ryanjcole at me.com> wrote: > S***. Either I deleted the "options" section or it only came out in my head. > > I have, presently, 2x2TB drives and I'm debating picking up another pair... > > Without having the NAS and SAN to run with for the data storage, how should I set up the 4 drives? I'm still a novice with handling Hypervisor. Should I retain the existing 250GB drive (and it's datastore) and just upgrade it to a mirror on the 2nd 250GB and then mirror the two 2TBs? Or do one more drive and do a RAID 5 with 4TB? or 2 more drives and a RAID5 with 6TB? > > I do not need speed. Not at all. This is not a high paced environment by any means, we're a small office but I need to be able to replace my expensive standalone servers with ones that are more efficient one one of them happens to be a fileserver. > > I'm sorry, I thought I got that out there before. > -- > Ryan > > On May 1, 2012, at 12:12 AM, Thomas Lunde wrote: > >> Ryan - >> >> Andrew isn't a mind reader and neither am I. I read your post and what he wrote is a completely reasonable response to WHAT YOU ACTUALLY WROTE. What you intended to write, or thought you wrote, may of course be different that what you actually wrote. >> >> If you'd like help, may I politely suggest that (a) you take another swing at describing your end goal and (b) don't be a dick to someone who is trying to help you. >> >> Kind regards, >> Thomas >> >> >> On Apr 30, 2012, at 11:16 PM, Ryan Coleman <ryanjcole at me.com> wrote: >> >>> That's the current system. I am getting rid of that; I have a datastore on that drive as well as the 500GB RAID. >>> >>> But thanks for reading my OP. >>> >>> Please read it back over and answer... Sorry to be a dick but I hate it when people don't actually read what I wrote. Since you didn't quote any of it I'm including it here for your reading pleasure: >>> >>>> I have a Dell server rebranded by CSC's FTL group that is currently running 4x250G drives. >>>> >>>> I want to replace each of those 250G drives with 2TB drives which should last us a while until the big corporation in the sky sees fit to either purchase us a NAS or SAN (which we are operating under the presumption will never happen). >>>> >>>> So I have 4 bays. the first 250GB presently is the install drive for the VM software. The other three are running a RAID5 to give me a stable 500GB of storage... >>>> >>>> I'm looking for options here on what to do for my splitting or should I use the whole thing? >>>> >>>> TIA, >>>> Ryan >>> >>> >>> On Apr 30, 2012, at 10:40 PM, Andrew S. Zbikowski wrote: >>> >>>> Do you really need 250 GB for the VM Hypervisor? VMWare ESX will boot >>>> off a USB flash drive. If you're using Linux KVM you would ideally >>>> want to have a minimalistic install anyway. A good Linux console only >>>> live distro doesn't even fill a single 700 MB CD. Unless you're doing >>>> something else on your VM host I would give it a small system >>>> partition. Limited space keeps temptation at bay. >>>> >>>> Personally I like things as simple as possible and would most likely >>>> just do one big volume. If you wanted to future proof the installation >>>> you could setup LVM so you can easily add disks/storage to your server >>>> down the road (via external array, JBOD enclosure, NAS, SAN, >>>> whatever), but my experience has been that we end up justifying the >>>> new servers and storage and end up doing new installs on the new >>>> hardware anyway, so the benefits of LVM don't end up justifying the >>>> extra complexity. YMMV of course. >>>> >>>> -- >>>> Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us >>>> IT Outhouse Blog Thing | http://www.itouthouse.com >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list