[CentOS] Centos as a file storage/backup destination (Advice)

[Craig White]

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


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