On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 4:39 AM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > What do you guys, gals too, think about this? Just add a drive or buy a > larger drive and move things over? Or is this a six of one and half > dozen of the other thing? >
Generally I buy drives at the sweet spot in cost/capacity, so that is about 3TB last time I checked (for spinning disks). I ALWAYS use RAID or full backups of some kind. RAID isn't really a substitute for backups, but I use it as such for low-priority data such as mythtv recordings or re-generatable data. Right now I'm running on mirrored btrfs with a full backup to ext4 (since btrfs is living dangerously). I'm actually getting tight on space and debating dropping the full backups for lower-priority data, which would free up a 3TB drive to add to the btrfs array. Long-term I'd prefer to move to raid5 which is much more efficient, but I wouldn't recommend doing that on btrfs yet - it is very immature. raid5 on mdadm and lvm with ext4 is very mature, and is probably your most space-efficient option with some level of redundancy. With large arrays having raid6 isn't a bad idea these days - it takes a lot of time to recover a failure. However, if you have a single drive today there is no way to add only a single disk and get both more space and redundancy at the same time. If you want more space and only want to buy one drive, then you're stuck with just simple lvm and if a drive fails you're going to lose a lot of stuff. -- Rich
