Is RAID going to do what I want?

RichDRichD Essex, UK
edited November 2008 in Hardware
Hi there,

I currently have a decent spec gaming rig and a laptop which is for general use about the house. I am about to build a home file server which will store all my music and be used as an HD DVD Player. My plan is to integrate the components into a draw in my TV cabinet and wire it up to my TV and home cinema. Should be a pretty sweet setup once I'm done. I am also probably going to be running Linux but that is up for debate.

My question is about the storage. I will probably have one boot disk which will host the OS and any other software. I am then debating what is the best solution for file storage? My two thoughts are a raid 1 with 400GB drives. The alternative is two 400GB drives not running in raid but one is a nightly backup of the other. What I am not sure about is if I go for the raid drives and one fails do I just put a new drive in and it will copy all the data across or do I still need to restore from backup? If I need to restore from backup then I don't see what the point of raid 1 is.

Any advice or comments would be appreciated.

Rich

Comments

  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited October 2008
    In your situation, RAID 1 will basically automate the process, so that if one drive fails, the computer will still boot, everything will be normal, and when you replace the drive and tell the controller to restore the array, it will do it invisibly and with no fuss.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited October 2008
    If you are running Raid 1 and 1 drive fails you put in a new drive and it rebuilds itself.

    I'd recommend no raid and use the 2nd disk for backup and here's why. The backup method though gives you a true backup. What that means is that with the Raid 1 method if you delete a file it's deleted from both drives it can't be recovered. But backup method you have a backup. Depending on how you are doing your backups you also have a few option. Since it's just file stores you could simply run a massive copy each night in which case you can pull that drive out at anytime and put it into a different machine and retrieve the files.

    You could also use backup software but I would actually suggest not to. Backup software will create backup volumes. So if you need to retrieve the data it has to go through the volume find it retrieve it etc.. it also means that if you want to recover that data you need to have that backup software installed first. The advantage to backup software is that it compresses the data but since you are going to be working with media files that are already compressed you aren't going to gain a huge benefit of compressing them again. You might see a 10% overall compression if you are lucky and that's being optimistic.

    If you do run linux (or with windows if you use a cygwin wrapper for it), it's got an amazing tool called rsync which does comparison copying drive to drive backups with rsync are amazingly fast after you've done the first copy.
  • RichDRichD Essex, UK
    edited October 2008
    Cheers guys,

    My other question is that is about cross platform networking. If I set up a linux file server, will my Windows PC be able to read it? I know linux Can read and write on a FAT and NTFS partion but I doubt Windows can read a Linux partion.

    Does that mean I should create a FAT32 partion on my server and use that for the file sharing?
  • CycloniteCyclonite Tampa, Florida Icrontian
    edited October 2008
    You'd use Samba to create a share from the Linux machine, then Windows can access it.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2008
    Yes, FAT32.
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited October 2008
    Don't use FAT32 for linux. Fat32 has limits when it comes to maximum file size and can cause problems specially if you are dealing with dvd rips. Plus using fat32 for the file format won't make it easier to share as it's still being processed by linux.

    If you run linux as a file server your better off to just use a native linux file format like ext3 or riserfs and share it out with samba. About the only time you may want to use Fat32 in a linux setup is if you are dual booting the machine between linux and windows, the Fat32 partition is easily readable by both OS's in that specific case. But now that linux can work with NTFS there isn't a need for that anymore either.
  • ManitcorManitcor
    edited November 2008
    Agreed, stick to ext3 for your file system. Once you are sharing it over a Samba mount the underlying file system does not matter to the clients using the share.

    I also agree with just running automated backups, particularly if this is going to be the main store for all your music and not just a shared store that is a copy of something else.
Sign In or Register to comment.