Unraid, freeNAS

[Kirk Reiser]

I have to agree with John here. Mirroring is the easiest and best
solution but 20tB is a lot of data.

I experimented with a couple different raid back-up arrangements over
the years with mixed results. raid-1 worked best for making large
amounts of storage look like one single file system but was a bitch to
piece back together when a drive crapped out. The other raids weren't
much better cost wise than just mirroring drives.

Over the years I've checked commercial network storage and it's always
been ideal and wonderful for amounts of data significantly less than
what I wanted to store. For amounts in the 3tB and up commercial costs
were always astronomical. I imagine those costs have slightly come
down but probably not as much as storage devices like hard drives
become cheaper as well.

The solution I finally settled on for myself was to mirror our
audio/text book collection which is currently about 3tB. I also have
another 700gB that I mirror with rsync on four different machines on
my LAN. Those 700gB are what I consider the data I don't wish to lose
like my personal music collection, my working source code repositories
such as chrome, opencog, etc.

My feeling is that unless you are a commercial enterprise and need to
keep 20tB of data safe, you will find it very expensive to do so. If a
good chunk of that data you share with other folks then each of you
taking on the mirroring of that portion may be a solution too. If you
need to keep all that data in a single file system then raid/lvm/mdam
will work but once again backing it up will turn out to be very
costly.

That's been my experience with large data sets and storage for what
it's worth.


On Fri, 11 May 2018, John Covici wrote:

> zfs would work very nicely, but not raid, use mirrored devices
> instead, if one device fails, you can replace it and it will rebuild
> what's on the device, and you don't need raid at all.  It will also
> prevent bitrot.
>
> Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
> How do
> you spend it?
>
>         John Covici wb2una
>         covici at ccs.covici.com
> _______________________________________________

cut cut cutting!