Lorne,
Yes, a mirrored pair of 4 or 6 TB drives are not so pricey these days.
When we last did this, we were in the middle of the great hard drive
famine (in the wake a massive flooding in Thailand) and drive prices
were pretty high. If they were going to retrofit an existing computer
that didn't have a lot of storage slots, an external drive bay would be
the easiest thing to do. If the external drive box provides JBOD over
USB, using UUID's for the drive assignments solves the sometimes random
way USB devices are attached and named. I hear trouble with USB
strangeness in the Windoz world than I do in Linux land. But, there are
a lot of drive boxes available with ESATA connections and that is
probably a more reliable interface.
If you had an ESATA connected 4 bay external box, you could put a pair
of 250 GB SSDs mirrored as the boot drive and a pair of 6 TB spinning
drives mirrored for the /var/snd volume. Then if you have a spare
computer, you can just do a fast swap if a power supply dies or the MB
develops a glitch.
We have a mostly digital environment at KPTZ. Our first Rivendell
clients used $30 eBay USB to S/PDIF for audio outputs. Those connected
right to our boards as AES/EBU inputs and worked great until Centos
forgot to include the drivers for the chips in them in one revision.
That forced us into buying ASI cards. Didn't sound different on the air
but cost substantially more.
- Bill
On 11/28/19 10:13 AM, Lorne Tyndale wrote:
Bill,
That's overall good advice, the only things I'd add is that I'm not a
big fan of Raid 5, I prefer Raid 1 which provides as full 1:1 mirror for
better redundancy and robustness. When hard disks cost a lot I could
see the benefit of Raid 5 giving you a little more storage space between
the same number of drives at the cost of a longer rebuild time and the
potential of a bigger loss if more then one drive failed. But as has
been pointed out, hard disk storage is cheap these days, I don't see the
benefit of doing a Raid 5 array any more.
As mentioned, it is still important to have a full backup strategy.
I'm also not a fan of using USB for primary /var/snd storage. I've had
too many instances where the USB connection drops, the cable comes lose
over time, or similar. USB is fine if you're running it as an external
backup drive or portable storage, but I would avoid relying on USB for a
mission critical playout system. In my view it is just running too much
of a risk. For similar reasons I don't like using USB sound cards for
primary on-air (or other mission critical) use.
Just my $0.02
Lorne Tyndale
I actually prefer to have /var/snd on a completely separate volume. If
you have the physical space to do it, I'd mirror the existing 1.5 TB
drive and build a RAID5 array for /var/snd. You could get an external 4
drive USB bay to store /var/snd. Playback of stereo audio needs less
than 1 Mbps, so USB wouldn't be challenged that much.
An automation system is not something you can easily rebuild quickly. It
pays to have it be fault tolerant to start with. We also rsync backup of
the entire system to a separate computer. It might be a little paranoid,
but it's relatively low cost insurance. Our Rivendell system has now
grown to a number of client stations from a single server. There's
really only 2 clients that playback. The other clients are used to
ingest content and build logs. We've really hardened the server. A
replacement client can be cloned on short notice and the failure of a
single client isn't going to cripple the operation.
- Bill
On 11/28/19 3:16 AM, drew Roberts wrote:
Mark,
On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 11:53 AM Mark Murdock
<m...@celebrationradio.com <mailto:m...@celebrationradio.com>> wrote:
So apparently, I need a drive much bigger than 1.5 TB unless I
want to run compressed files. I wish I had known this going into
this. The Rivendell System Requirements specify a 1 TB drive.
Maybe that should be bumped up to 4 TB for music stations that
want to store uncompressed files.
"
Do I have to start over from scratch for the server, or can I
clone the 1.5 TB drive?
"
You do not have to do either.
You can take a 2 to 4 TB drive for instance. Format it and mount it
somewhere temporarily. Copy the audio files in /var/snd to that drive.
Now *mount* that drive as /var/snd. Edit your fstab to make this mount
on boot.
all the best,
drew
If I clone the drive, won’t it preserve the 50 GB size on
/dev/mapper/centos-root?
Thanks,
Mark Murdock
KAMB
90 E. 16^th St.
Merced, CA 95340
(209) 723-1015
m...@celebrationradio.com <mailto:m...@celebrationradio.com>
Website <https://celebrationradio.com/>
all the best,
drew
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El Jefe de Contenido - Port Townsend Film Festival
Private Pilot-Single Engine Land | Airframe & Powerplant Mechanic / Inspection
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