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Vermillion
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2007
- Messages
- 4,416
So yesterday was an adventure. My Plex is just an older Core 2 Duo desktop running Ubuntu 16.04 with two USB drives jacked into it. A 1TB and a 2TB. No parity or anything so if a drive died I was screwed.
So I was looking at things like Drobo to replace the drives with. Was already asking for some of those items for Christmas. Grand total for a Drobo with the cache SSD and five 2TB drives was just under $1000. Thankfully though I was listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast and Martin Wimpress was talking about what he had just done for an opensource Drobo.
Simple enclosure, SnapRAID ( https://www.snapraid.it/ ) , and Mergerfs ( https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs ). Simple, easy, and really effective. So I opted for that option instead.
All said and done four 2 TB drives and the enclosure about $450.
So i pulled my drives and rebuilt the desktop with Ubuntu 18.04. That was a mistake. I should have just done a system upgrade to 18.04 and stayed on Unity. Gnome is such garbage. Fucking Mutter crashes, GUFW crashed constantly until I ran a command that was fucking supposed to only fix Wayland, and x11vnc crashes after about 10 minutes of usage.
Had none of those problems on the 16.04 system. So learned my lesson on that one. But I stuck it out and got 18.04 updated and stabilized minus the x11vnc issue.
So with SnapRAID it's a very robust way to store the data. For me I added everything to the FSTAB and created the snapraid with the 4 disks. 3 disks are ext4 and the 4 disk is XFS and is the parity drive. SnapRAID allows any combination of drive sizes as long as the parity drive is the same size as the largest disk in the "array".
Now SnapRAID doesn't make the 3 disks one giant disk. So basically if a drive dies the data on the other two are still good. Replace the dead drive and rebuild via the parity drive and you're all set to go again. The other added benefit to this is that with SnapRAID in conjunction with Smartmon you can actually power down the individual drives while not in use. So 3 of the 4 drives don't have to be spinning for me to be watching something.
However, dealing with data migration to the Plex and having to pay attention to which disk has what data is annoying which is where Mergerfs comes in. It makes the 3 disks look like one logical disk (in my case I called it /storage) to the OS and it uses it's own logic to determine where the data goes.
Overall I'm very pleased with SnapRAID and Mergerfs. It's working great so far. I'm migrated about 70% of my data from the other drives to the new system and it works really well.
The only other problem I ran into was last night just before bed when I finally installed Plex Media Server itself (after the 2TB drive was done migrating). I opted for the Snap version of Plex. Bad idea. It's not that Plex doesn't work, it's the containment from the Snap. The Snap version couldn't see the /storage folder at all. Making /storage accessible to the Snap was more pain then I was willing to put up with last night. So I ended up removing the Snap and just installing the .deb. No issues, no bullshit, just a working Plex again with more peace of mind.
So I was looking at things like Drobo to replace the drives with. Was already asking for some of those items for Christmas. Grand total for a Drobo with the cache SSD and five 2TB drives was just under $1000. Thankfully though I was listening to the Linux Unplugged podcast and Martin Wimpress was talking about what he had just done for an opensource Drobo.
Simple enclosure, SnapRAID ( https://www.snapraid.it/ ) , and Mergerfs ( https://github.com/trapexit/mergerfs ). Simple, easy, and really effective. So I opted for that option instead.
All said and done four 2 TB drives and the enclosure about $450.
So i pulled my drives and rebuilt the desktop with Ubuntu 18.04. That was a mistake. I should have just done a system upgrade to 18.04 and stayed on Unity. Gnome is such garbage. Fucking Mutter crashes, GUFW crashed constantly until I ran a command that was fucking supposed to only fix Wayland, and x11vnc crashes after about 10 minutes of usage.
Had none of those problems on the 16.04 system. So learned my lesson on that one. But I stuck it out and got 18.04 updated and stabilized minus the x11vnc issue.
So with SnapRAID it's a very robust way to store the data. For me I added everything to the FSTAB and created the snapraid with the 4 disks. 3 disks are ext4 and the 4 disk is XFS and is the parity drive. SnapRAID allows any combination of drive sizes as long as the parity drive is the same size as the largest disk in the "array".
Now SnapRAID doesn't make the 3 disks one giant disk. So basically if a drive dies the data on the other two are still good. Replace the dead drive and rebuild via the parity drive and you're all set to go again. The other added benefit to this is that with SnapRAID in conjunction with Smartmon you can actually power down the individual drives while not in use. So 3 of the 4 drives don't have to be spinning for me to be watching something.
However, dealing with data migration to the Plex and having to pay attention to which disk has what data is annoying which is where Mergerfs comes in. It makes the 3 disks look like one logical disk (in my case I called it /storage) to the OS and it uses it's own logic to determine where the data goes.
Overall I'm very pleased with SnapRAID and Mergerfs. It's working great so far. I'm migrated about 70% of my data from the other drives to the new system and it works really well.
The only other problem I ran into was last night just before bed when I finally installed Plex Media Server itself (after the 2TB drive was done migrating). I opted for the Snap version of Plex. Bad idea. It's not that Plex doesn't work, it's the containment from the Snap. The Snap version couldn't see the /storage folder at all. Making /storage accessible to the Snap was more pain then I was willing to put up with last night. So I ended up removing the Snap and just installing the .deb. No issues, no bullshit, just a working Plex again with more peace of mind.
