On 16 Mar 2010, at 16:32, Steve wrote:
...
Given the point above I would also stick with software RAID.
...
If reliability is your primary concern, I would go for a simple RAID1
setup;
Absolutely. Software raid is cheaper and implies less hardware to
fail. Similarly, RAID1 minimises the total number of disks required
to
survive a failure. It's the only way for me to go.
How does your system boot if your RAID1 system volume fails? The one
you have grub on? I think you mentioned a flash drive, which I've seen
mentioned before. This seems sound, but just to point out that's
another, different, single point of failure.
If you do not need data sharing (i.e. if your volumes are only
mounted
by one client at a time), the simplest solution is to completely
avoid
having a FS on the storage server side -- just export the raw block
device via iSCSI, and do everything on the client.
...
Snap-shots, of course, are only really valuable for non-archive
data...
so, in future, I could add a ZFS volume using the same iSCSI strategy.
I have wondered if it might be possible to create a large file (`dd
if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/large/file` constrain at a size of 20gig or
100gig or whatever) and treat it as a loopback device for stuff like
this. It's not true snapshotting (in the ZFS / BTFS sense), but you
can unmount it and make a copy quite quickly.
Stroller.
