On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Tony Molloy tony.molloy@ul.ie wrote:
On Tuesday 04 September 2012 15:20:26 Paul Tader wrote:
The second MD1200 will be used to backup the first, using BackupPC and for other storage purposes.
As I won't know the storage requirements for the "backup partition" and they will probably change over time anyway. I was thinking of using LVM for it. So how to partition the MD1200 for LVM. I don't want to put all 12 disks in a RAID5 and put a LVM volume on it. Can I split it into 2 RAID5 and have a LVM volume spanning both.
Just a thought about the backup volume.
Because it going to be used for backups and your retirement (congrats!) I would configure one partition and no volume management on top. Why? Because backups are like insurance policies. That are not fun and no one reviews them, but when you need them, you really hope that everything is in order. So you don't want the next admin to find out several months or years down the road that the backup software ran out of space and has been failing to back anything up for the previous few months.
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Thanks to Gotz, Blake, Paul and Nate for your advice.
I was pretty happy with the split RAID 5 for the NFS partitions on the first MD1200.
I think I'll go with the simple solution for the backup MD1200. A single RAID 5 encompassing all 12 disks probably with 2 hot spares. Put an ext4 on top of that without the complexity of LVM.
Thanks,
Tony
aside Paul, unfortunately my retirement is not voluntary. It's due to a spinal cord injury but such is life ;-)
I would highly suggest RAID 6 if you are dealing with drives over 2TB in size. Errors during rebuild happen and rebuild times for 2TB+ drives can get pretty long, especially if you are building one 12 disk RAID.
Also important if a non-savvy admin is going to take over administration. What if they pull the wrong drive during a replacement on a failed RAID5 array?