From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Robin Bowes Subject: Best way to achieve large, expandable, cheap storage? Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 14:20:11 +0100 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Hi, I have a business opportunity which would involve a large amount of storage, possibly growing to 10TB in the first year, possibly more. This would be to store media files - probably mainly .flac or .mp3 files. Concurrency wouldn't be particularly important as I'd be the only person access the storage and I have no need for lightning speed. It would be nice to be able to start smallish and grow as required, but my experience of linux raid to date is that it's not possible to resize arrays. (I have a 1TB array built from 6 x 250GB SATA discs on Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers). Can anyone offer recommendations as to the most cost-effective way to achieve this sort of storage? Are there any limitations I might run into using md on Linux? For example, suppose I get something like this [1] and throw in an appropriate mobo/processor etc and 24 x 500 GB SATA discs; would md/mdadm be able to create a single 11TB RAID5 partition, ie (23-1) x 500, with a hot-spare? Would this be a sensible thing to do? What about file-system limitations, e.g. would ext3/reiser/XFS support an 11TB partition? Would I be better off creating smaller volumes combining them with RAID0? I'd appreciate any tips/suggestions/advice/pointers to further sources of information. Thanks, R. -- http://robinbowes.com If a man speaks in a forest, and his wife's not there, is he still wrong?