What OS and/or filesystem to use for expandable storage?

D

diggƒreak

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 8, 2006
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173
Hi [H]ard Storage,

I've always admired the monster storage rigs you guys have, and I figure it's time to finally build my own.

I have about 5 1TB drives, 1 2TB, 3 500GB, 2 320GB, and a few other drives lying around each with one ext3 or ext4 volume filled to the brim. As a no-frills backup system, I have all my important files on at least two of the drives.

What I want to set up is an NFS rig with a boot volume and a single storage volume, to which I can add drives and re-build, re-balance at will. Preferably the volume will have some sort of redundancy.

Essentially, I want to be able to slap new drives in there and have the filesystem increase in size after a few commands. I'm willing to try ZFS, BTRFS looks like a cool option as well. Are there any well established distros for this?
 
Whats you comfort level with *nix? That may be a good starting question. Although you mention having ext3/4 volumes so I would assume your comphy with it.

for ZFS, i would go with the OI+NapIT (sp?) setup, you'll pretty much always see that thread in the first or second page on here.

You could also use the community version of Nexenta for ZFS (i believe it maxes out at 12tb tho)

FreeNAS is good and easy (though im a bit out of the loop, not sure if they updated to the latest revision of ZFS)

Im sure other guys on here can reccomend suitable windows storage options, which are certainly relevant as well (not my personal pref tho)

alot of this will also depend on what hardware you plan to us. do you already have a mobo? if so, which?

what is your budget to spend on a suitable case. etc
 
For ZFS you need to add a bunch of drives at a time or you lose too much space.
 
I think I would just sell all of the drives and replace them with 1 internal 3TB drive and 1 or better yet 2 external 3TB drives for backups.

What I want to set up is an NFS rig with a boot volume and a single storage volume, to which I can add drives and re-build, re-balance at will. Preferably the volume will have some sort of redundancy.
Click to expand...

lvm + some filesystem or btrfs or zfs support this. However I would avoid spanning individual disks. There is also snapraid which does not span but combine the independent drives with some redundancy.

http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/
 
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