On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 10:26 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
Roland Roland wrote:
Hello all,
am considering setting up centos as a file storage/ backup destination for Mac's TimeMachine.
all my users would get synced directly to specific folders on this machine.. needless to say space is of importance. where every user has an average 200 GB of data to b synced (entire system)... I have 27 users hence 27 *200 equals to almost 6 TB so I was considering getting either 4 * 1.5 TB or 6 * 1 TB to be used on one PIV with a 1 GB ethernet.
I would think you should use raid for this, at least raid 5, which requires N+1 for N drives worth of storage. and you probably want a hotspare in case a drive fails.
but the thing is, I'm an expert with this! so I'm seeking your help.. is there any other way to do so ? is there any limitation hardware/centos wise for the amount of drives available on a system? is Motherboard available sata/ide slots is the only limitation? how about using a USB hub and plugging them as such?
USB drives are quite slow, you want to use SATA for this. you can get PCI-E sata expansion cards, ideally on PCI-E x4 slots which have sufficient bandwidth (pci-e x1 would be a bottleneck for more than a couple drives)
I'd suggest getting a 'storage server' with sufficient drive bays and channels for what you're doing.
a server like http://www.asaservers.com/config.asp?config_id=ASA4002-X2Q-S2-S holds 8 hotswap drive bays and is quite customizable.
---- agreed but I am not a fan of RAID-5 any more because it is so slow. Suggest RAID 10/0+1
Also, you probably are going to have partition off each user because Time Machine will claim up to 2 TB each instance as sparse files and if you don't partition, you will find the first ones to setup will claim a lot more space than you had intended. Do some research into how Time Machine actually operates.
Craig