New Linux based server

Tomsk

Tomsk

Tomsk

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I've been using a AMD R5-3600/GT1060/32GB based windows PC as a combination PC and server.
It's in a Xigmatek case that has 12 5.25" drive bays. Currently fitted with 12x3.5" modular bays populated with various HDs (5 to 20TB) for a total of about 100TB
It has a LSI 9300-16i 16-Port card for connecting the various sized HDs.
I used Drivepool to manage the disks and 'soft raid' them.

I've just got a new Minisforum 870 to use as my Windows PC. (Have to stick with WIndows 'cos I've got some Excel sheets with macros that I share with others)

I want to convert the R5 system to a Linux based server, but it will still be used for some normal PC tasks.

I've dabbled with Linux Mint before, so I would like to stay with that if possible on the R5 system.

Is there an equivalent to Drivepool for Linux? ZFS?
Drivers for the LSI card?

Any advice would be welcome.

TIA
 
No drivers needed for LSI card on Linux at least I did not need any its a HBA card out of the box afaik. The drives connected to the LSI show up in BIOS too unlike a RAID card.
 
If you want to pool a bunch of disparate sized drives, IMO there's really nothing that can touch Drivepool for features and ease of use. The nearest you'll get in Linux is probably mergerfs, posssibly in combination with snapraid if you want some redundancy, but it's nowhere near as convenient and user friendly.

Forget about ZFS, it's great at what it does but I don't think it's really suitable for your use case.

You could check out Unraid which is highly rated around here, but personally I think they've got a bit greedy with their pricing and not quite the easy recommendation they once were.
 
If you want easier, get unraid. I'm with CaptainCrash on it being overpriced now though.

MergerFS is the 'cross platform' alternative iirc to unraids mixed disks and then add snapraid for redundancy, at least that seems to be the consensus on line. Not sure how user friendly it is though. It's probably the foundation for unraid...
Take a read about it here https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/snapraid/

I've got an LSI 93xx card in my server, well a chinese one anyway lol, and it didn't need drivers.

I'm not bothering with ZFS on my unraid server, it wouldn't suit mixed disks anyway.
 
Ubuntu Server has been great for me. Solid enough and loads of documentation and a great amount of packages available etc. Similar obviously to the Debian comment above I guess. My LSI card worked no issues at all. I’m using ZFS in RAIDz2 but on reflection it’s probably overkill for my modest NAS storage needs. Not sure what I’d use instead though.
 
Not sure of your use-case but you could pool the drives using btrfs. I have 24TB of data on a btrfs pool (on Debian) and it's been rock solid for years. Really simple to set up and mount.

There are various levels of raid available but I just use simple pooling - the data isn't protected from drive failure but it's backed up elsewhere anyway.
 
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