Mine's arriving tomorrow so I thought I'd ask for a bit of advice. I will be installing Ubuntu Server as my background is in Linux and not Windows. It'll be for storing media files, backups and running XMBC until my Rasberry Pi arrives... I'm a bit stuck as how to sort the storage though, up until now I've had 2x500Gb in RAID 1 in a NAS. I also have a 1Tb drive in my desktop which I could swap for the 250Gb contained if needed.
My question is, should I hold on to setup proper storage until I get 3x decent drives or setup with the drives I have now? If so, what sort of arrangement would you recommend on Linux? I'm familiar with all the admin side, just not storage.
EDIT: ZFS is looking a good option, I didn't realise it had a Linux port now. How do the pools work compared to a RAID setup?
Pools are collections of storage, and ZFS will "stripe" across all the storage devices within to get you fast transfer speeds. So you can have a pool containing a RAIDZ (ZFS software parity RAID, like RAID5) and then throw in a mirrored array from your hardware RAID and even a USB pen stick and it won't bat an eye, but remember that you'll be as vulnerable as the weakest part of your pool.
The downside is that you can't expand the number of drives in a RAIDZ, so say you had a 3 drive RAIDZ as the only member of a pool, then got a fourth drive. You wouldn't be able to add that fourth drive into the existing RAIDZ, you'd only be able to add it in to the pool as a drive on it's own, which would be risky. If you wanted to maintain the same level of protection you'd have to buy two more drives and create a second three drive RAIDZ which could be added to the pool (creating the equivalent of a RAID50)
I'm pretty sure you can replace disks in a RAIDZ one by one with larger ones and when they are all replaced you'll get the extra space.
sooo, planning is important if you don't want to end up with more drives given over to resiliency than you'd really like.
I've just got a fifth 2TB drive for mine, and I'm going to have to move the existing data off the pool, break it all down and start again to turn it from a 4 drive RAIDZ to a 5 drive RAIDZ.
Apart from that minor annoyance, It's nice, I actually changed OS from Solaris to Ubuntu Server with ZFS (was chasing better SMB speeds) and I was able to import my old pool with all data intact with a simple one line command (something like 'ZFS import')
