On 2021-01-22 14:26, mick crane wrote:
hello,
I want to tidy things up as suggested.
Have one old PC that I'll put 2 disks in and tidy everything up so
what's scattered about is on the running disks and this new/old one is
just backup for them.
Can I assume that Debian installer in some expert mode will sort out the
raid or do I need to install to one disk and then mirror it manually
before invoking the raid thing ?
I would install a small SSD and do a fresh install of the OS onto that.
I would then install the two HDD's and set up a mirror (RAID 1). Linux
options include Multiple Device md(4), Linux Volume Manager lvm(8), and
ZFS zfs(8).
A key issue with storage is bit rot. btrfs and ZFS have it.
dm-integrity (man page?) can provide it for Linux solutions without.
btrfs requires maintenance. I did not do it, and my disks suffered.
ZFS does not require maintenance and has many killer features. I have
not tried dm-integrity, but would be interested in reading a HOWTO for
Debian.
Due to CDDL and GPL licensing conflicts, ZFS is not fully integrated
into Debian. ZFS can be installed and used on Debian, but ZFS-on-root
is not supported by the Debian installer.
The CDDL and BSD licenses are compatible. So, ZFS is fully integrated
on FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD installer can do ZFS-on-root. FreeBSD has
other features I like. I use FreeBSD and ZFS on my servers; including
storage (Samba).
David