I’m really new to this whole setup and as I’m figuring out how I want to move forward, I figured I should pose the question to the more experienced folks here
Here’s what I’ve got for drives at the moment:
1 x 3TB drive that’s holding my media (not in Rockstor yet)
2 x 2TB drives that are Raid 0 in RockStor and are holding a 250GB vmdk being used by ESXi
For the best in resiliency…should I store data in the raid array for performance and take backups of it to put on the 3TB (which can act as a standalone storage device…no raid)? Or perhaps there’s a better setup? Just some thoughts on this would be appreciated…as I said its all new to me
depends how much you want to invest.
raid != backup
storage is cheap
your best option in btrfs is raid1 (in large disks sets it’s raid10)
raid 5 & 6 ARE VERY BROKEN at the moment
FYI, you can have all your 3 disks in raid 1 on btrfs and it will result in your case with ~3.5TB usable storage.
Ok thanks for the recommendation! I think for now I’ll just keep non-critical data in the RAID 0 and ensure everything is backed up accordingly using Crashplan or my external USB HDD. Perhaps another drive is in order to get to a RAID10 setup.
Just don’t forget, within single file system you can have multiple raid levels.
So let’s assume a standard use case ( my LSD trip ;D )
1 fs spaning over 5 x 3TB disks
obviously:
system: raid1
metadata: raid1
data:
default filesystem setting: raid1
your folder: raid10 (because how quickly those cat videos load is a must)
a special folder [pron]: raid0 … because you care about it, but let’s face it you already have a backup at pron.com so loss is not that critical.
And that way with btrfs you achive a best of all worlds ( when it works )
AND honestly if you have a lot of data that is no already compressed ( pictures / mpeg derivative video / compressed audio) you can technically get a tone of space from enabling compression and having whole FS in raid1 without any more headaches …
Cool! Didn’t realize it had that level of flexibility…although your ‘when it works’ raises my hackles a bit Got lots more stability testing to do I suppose before I fully rely on it for storage/nfs
Let’s not forget that my LDS trip is how I would set up a vanila linux distro for home …
Rockstor is for monkeys … and I’m one of them - because I’m willing to sacrifice a price of another disk to get extra stability, less configuration hassle in the future, more stable upgrade path, less points of failure, in general less messing about with stuff that does not directly contribute to my well being.
So always consider those factors (personally I would not touch a raid0 with 10 foot pole, if I store stuff locally = I care, if not I have it online on pron.com … think about how much a downtime of recreating a raid0 cost you even if you don’t fill it with original data … if you’re telling me that your time is worth nothing, than that’s OK, but I’ve got some code to write for me :P)
You’d have to move the share to a pool that is configured for RAID10. RAID configuration is done at the POOL level not at the share level.
That being said I am in a similar boat where I want one of my shares that currently resides on a RAID0 pool to be moved to a RAID1 pool (different sized disks for those pools so I haven’t config’ed a RAID10 unfortunately) but Im not sure of the best way to do that. I guess I could create a new share on the RAID1 pool and then just do a ‘mv’ command via the CLI…I’ve updated a post in this forum specifically about that but haven’t seen a response unfortunately.
again, this might be my mighty LSD trip but I was always convinced that you can change format on sub volumes with “atr +something” BUT I’ve always has no need for that … seriously I’m now sufficiently confused to attribute this to some lsd flashbacks
)