Moving to rockstor

1

Hi,

I’m retiring my old VIA M’serv based NAS and building a new Xeon-based NAS. I currently have 26TB disks on md-raid 1. I’m installing OS on separate 64GB SSD and buying 210TB disks. How would you recommend configuring the disks? Would one big pool be good or what? BTRFS Raid-1 sounds good but hopefully I had one copy of the data on one of the new disks and other on the old (not both on the old disks). They might become error prone (WD Red’s) since they have something like 25k power-on hours already. So I would have 210TB and 26TB on the NAS for now, when 6TB start failing I’d replace those with 10TB disks.

Also backup? Anyone running NAS data to crashplan? This will be for SMB as I work from home and idea is to backup all computers (Mac laptops mostly, time machine working?) to Rockstor and then backup that to the cloud as well.

2

Hi @Jorma,

According to Carfax BTRFS calculator, BTRFS RAID 1 as one big pool will be the best option for you in terms of both redundancy and efficient use of space.

Please note that BTRFS is not a normal RAID configuration, it uses variable width striping to allow for multiple different disk sizes. This means that there’s no particular guarantee that any piece of data will be distributed as per your specification, it only guarantees that each piece of data is located on at least 2 disks.

My suggestion for your changeover would be

  • Build a BTRFS RAID 1 with the 2x10Tb disks on the Xeon machine
  • Copy existing data over network from Via machine
  • Kill the mdraid on the via machine and Zero the superblock of all disks
  • Physically move the disks from Via machine to Xeon
  • Assign Whole Disk roles to the two disks from Rockstor -> Storage -> Disks
  • Add the two disks from Rockstor -> Storage -> Pools
  • Start a balance from Rockstor -> Storage -> Pools -> Balances tab

I haven’t used CrashPlan myself, however I know that there’s a rockon available for it.
One assumes that the rockon config allows you to import shares so that you can define your backups based upon them.
I might have a play with it tonight and how it works - if I get time.