|Has anyone tried this yet? Will things like fsck still work on a
|filesystem this large?
sure, but it'll take a REALLY long time. I believe that reiserfs is out
now, you may want to look into that. (it's journalled as I remember,
so fscks (unless forced) aren't necessary.) optionally, ext3 or XFS (both
when available) would be good too.
|I'm able to get the 50gig disks rather cheaply (about US$1150) so this
|seems like a really inexpensive way to build a huge file store without
|paying a huge Network Appliance/EMC type of premium. The system is going
Yes and no. NetApp's (what I'm used to) get you more than just a big
disk. I assume EMC/etc do the same. (optimized performance, journaled
fs, snapshots, easily growable fs, security (they only do one thing),
etc, etc.) It depends what you want to do, and how much you're willing
to pay though. If you only need to give a large amount of file space to
a handful of systems, local disk is the way to go. If you want to serve
data to a network, you may want to plan long-term and go with something
beefier and optimized for networking file serving.
I have 4 NetApps which serve out data required by all hosts on my
network... Wouldn't dream of trading them in for an equally sized
RAID array. I also have several systems which have a need for large
amounts of disk space for themselves. I wouldn't dream of trading in
the RAID arrays for anything else.
|to be backed up daily. I'm more concerned with total space and
|read/write performance than redundancy (which is why I'm using RAID 0
|instead of 3 or 5).
be warned, the MTBF of a RAID 0 array is (MTBF of single disk)/(#
of disks). you're much more prone to lose all of the data that way.
to back up 200Gb on one of the netapps I have, it takes 27 hours
(streaming to DLT4000's). restore time is probably at least that long.
I would urge RAID 5 for something that large. it's slower writes (and
a smaller array) than raid 0, but when the first disk fails and you've
saved yourself hours of restores, you'll be happy.
and if you're really concerned about performance, I'd suggest a
hardware-based RAID setup (either RAID controller or external RAID
enclosure). it also makes administration a little easier (don't have to muck
around with how to boot, etc, etc.) I've had great successes with the
PowerRAID stuff from Zzyzx (www.zzyzx.com).
|Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
you haven't mentioned what you need the 300gb of space for, so advice may or
may not be useful. what are you trying to do?
