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I'm looking to set up a home file server + bittorrent server with a raid configuration. I'm pretty adept at linux and windows, so I'm not afraid to get down and dirty. I'm not fluent at all with raids though. I guess my concern is if I go with a software raid (with the OS on a separate physical drive), what happens if the OS shits itself / OS drive dies? Likewise, what if I want to completely upgrade? can I through the 5 or 6 drives in a new box, new mb, etc, and the raid will "just work"? Also, is it easy to dynamically expand RAID 5 arrays via the command line / etc? Do I need to pre-plan for this occasion? I was thinking of setting up a base OS with the RAID on it and to serve files via SMB, and then creating a virtual machine to set up a rtorrent + webui client. This then gives me the option of creating more VM's to do anything I want (e.g. set up a LAMP server). Alternatively, I could just run bittorrent in the host OS, but I'd just be worried about if the bittorrent client poo poo itself / got compromised I might hvae to rebuild the box, and hence the array. To do this, I was thinking of getting 4 x 750 SATA drives for a RAID 5, have a 40gb linux OS array, and then use two spare 320 IDE drives as a bittorrent "scratch" disk. I.e. when bittorrnet has finished downloading, copy the files into my file structure on the RAID (so I can rename and make the file structure pretty). See any problems with this? Anything I should look out for?
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Jun 17, 2008 01:59
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 09:45 |
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IOwnCalculus posted:It is supposed to, in fact, 'just work' with minimal tweaking - I haven't had to test it yet, but your proposed setup is extremely similar to mine - 4x500GB in RAID5, 2x250GB in RAID0 as a scratch drive for torrents / whatever. do you have any links on how to recover from a software raid array on another machine? i'd like to see how easy / hard / problematic it is before i decide software or hardware raid.
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Jun 17, 2008 12:34
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With a linux software raid array, how would I go about re-installing the base os? if i had a separate IDE OS drive, and a 3 750gb SATA drives in RAID-5, could I just reformat the IDE drive, re-install linux and it would pick up the raid like it was already there, or do I have to issue some commands to mount it? I was probably thinking of ubuntu server as the base os, but may want to re-install a different distro at a later date.
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Jul 3, 2008 02:17
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WickedMetalHead posted:I have this exact setup, debian installed on a 250GB IDE and a software raid5 done with mdadm of 3 x 750 GB SATA drives. That's exactly what I needed to here. I'll probably give it a test in a VM first, but yeah, it was the only issue I was concerned about. Also, what do you guys use for automatic monitoring on headless boxes? I was thinking of writing a cron script to check drive status / usage, but also maybe other stuff like available apt updates, etc. If someone has one already written it would save me some time.
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Jul 3, 2008 02:38
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So I've finally got the spare cash to splurge on my home file server / headless torrent box. I've got a spare 1300mhz athlon box floating around, but I'm not sure how well it would suit the task. For starters, I'd need to get a PCI SATA card, and probably a new power supply as the current one is noisy as hell. Plus, I don't know what the driver support for the MB would be like under linux, seeing as it's so old. What do you think? If I were to go a new box, what MB would you recommend? I'd be looking for 6 sata ports primarily, and preferably 2 IDE channels, that's it really. Gig-e lan would be nice, but not required. I saw the earlier recommendation of the Gigabyte P35-DS3R, but I can't find it anywhere near where I live (or via online retailers). Anything else that's reasonably budget priced fit the bill? Also, if you're going for the quiet-pc route, do you usually go for aftermarket CPU coolers? I saw the Zalman quiet PSU range, and I think I'll get one of those cause they're reasonably priced as well.
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Jul 21, 2008 11:03
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 09:45 |
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Remember that drives pull the most power at spinup, and I'm pretty sure a 3.5" hard drive will pull more than 8 watts at spinup. How do you stagger the spin up of drives? Does this require a BIOS that supports staggered spin ups?
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Aug 6, 2008 01:20
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