arad85
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I'm quite stunned...
As some of you may know, I'm a geek...
and last year I got fed up with XP on my home server as drives were losing directories every now and again plus I wanted robustness on my data.
I may be a geek, but I'm also a skinflint and I have all my media stored on the central server. I was going to run Linux with RAID5 and was getting myself into a twist with cards, support, what happens if the controller dies etc... so I started looking into which was the best filesystem for my needs and came across ZFS on OpenSolaris. Enterprise wide filesystem, great data integrity and you can run something called RAIDZ which is a software RAID5 but in software.
I ended up installing FreeBSD 8.2 and have had it running nicely since September last year. One set of disks (in a RAID1 mirror under ZFS) have always been connected to an old SATA1 cheapo PCI card and have always been slow. Also, doing some digging in my bootup messages, the disks that are in the RAIDZ array are attached vis 2 different controllers due to the Mobo architecture so it was time for a rework.
Before moving, I took my spare disk (which is a hot spare) and mounted it as a filesystem so I could backup the important bits of data on the RAID just in case! To remove the hot spare (named label/disk5) from the raid array (called storage) and mount it as a drive itself (as /tempstore) took 2 commands:
and then just accessed as a normal drive. How cool was that.
Purchased 2 Adaptec 1430SA cards (basically PCI-e x4 -> SATA II adapters) as the cheapest way I could find of moving 7 drives to the PCI-e bus with a reputable manufacturer and plugged them in. Then plugged the 7 disks in to the new adapters and told the boot system to load the driver for them.
Reboot and voila, my RAIDZ array is just re recognised - on new controllers - and all as bright shiny SATA2 connected. So the hours of waiting to copy my main data wasn't needed - it just worked.
So to put my hot spare back into the array named storage, first destroy it and then add it as a spare:
Whole thing took 10-15 minutes (actually it took a couple of hours as I also upgraded the heatsink!!).
If you are building your own fileserver and want RAID5 levels of protection (actually RAIDZ is quite a bit better than RAID5) without the worry of what happens if my RAID controller dies, I thoroughly recommend looking into a system that has ZFS supported as a filesystem.
Apologies for the geekiness of the post (as Ms arad85 puts it "geekiness spelled with an F"), but I'm a very happy chappy at the moment
As some of you may know, I'm a geek...
and last year I got fed up with XP on my home server as drives were losing directories every now and again plus I wanted robustness on my data.I may be a geek, but I'm also a skinflint and I have all my media stored on the central server. I was going to run Linux with RAID5 and was getting myself into a twist with cards, support, what happens if the controller dies etc... so I started looking into which was the best filesystem for my needs and came across ZFS on OpenSolaris. Enterprise wide filesystem, great data integrity and you can run something called RAIDZ which is a software RAID5 but in software.
I ended up installing FreeBSD 8.2 and have had it running nicely since September last year. One set of disks (in a RAID1 mirror under ZFS) have always been connected to an old SATA1 cheapo PCI card and have always been slow. Also, doing some digging in my bootup messages, the disks that are in the RAIDZ array are attached vis 2 different controllers due to the Mobo architecture so it was time for a rework.
Before moving, I took my spare disk (which is a hot spare) and mounted it as a filesystem so I could backup the important bits of data on the RAID just in case! To remove the hot spare (named label/disk5) from the raid array (called storage) and mount it as a drive itself (as /tempstore) took 2 commands:
Code:
zpool remove storage label/disk5
zpool create tempstore label/disk5and then just accessed as a normal drive. How cool was that.
Purchased 2 Adaptec 1430SA cards (basically PCI-e x4 -> SATA II adapters) as the cheapest way I could find of moving 7 drives to the PCI-e bus with a reputable manufacturer and plugged them in. Then plugged the 7 disks in to the new adapters and told the boot system to load the driver for them.
Reboot and voila, my RAIDZ array is just re recognised - on new controllers - and all as bright shiny SATA2 connected. So the hours of waiting to copy my main data wasn't needed - it just worked.
So to put my hot spare back into the array named storage, first destroy it and then add it as a spare:
Code:
zpool destroy tempstore
zpool add storage spare label/disk5Whole thing took 10-15 minutes (actually it took a couple of hours as I also upgraded the heatsink!!).
If you are building your own fileserver and want RAID5 levels of protection (actually RAIDZ is quite a bit better than RAID5) without the worry of what happens if my RAID controller dies, I thoroughly recommend looking into a system that has ZFS supported as a filesystem.
Apologies for the geekiness of the post (as Ms arad85 puts it "geekiness spelled with an F"), but I'm a very happy chappy at the moment
