Bit of a vague title I know, mainly because I'm not sure if this question is better asked here or in Storage. However...
My media server has a number of simple disks which are accessed over the network via Windows DFS shares/paths, which effectively present a pooled view of the data. I've just had a bit of trouble with one of the drives, and although no data was lost and I'm not that precious about the data on the drives, it would still be a little bothersome if I had to replace any lost data.
So that got me thinking about RAID5/6 and ZFS and after a little research the fact that neither will usefully support online capacity expansion is a bit of a show-stopper for me. Yes I know you can add vdevs to a zpool and you can grow arrays by replacing all of the drives with larger variants, but what I'm far more likely to want to do is simply add another drive to the storage pool and take advantage of that additional space straight away.
My conclusion at the moment is that something like FlexRAID or SnapRAID is the best option. I can create the pool with drives that already contain data, and FlexRAID also offers some protection with a parity drive. The idea of periodic snapshotting is perfect for a media library that has relatively few changes day-to-day. However, it does worry me slightly that to my mind there's some witchcraft going on under the hood and I'm not sure how easily I'd be able to get at the data in a disaster.
So does anyone here have any experience with this sort of scenario? I'd love to hear your thoughts
My media server has a number of simple disks which are accessed over the network via Windows DFS shares/paths, which effectively present a pooled view of the data. I've just had a bit of trouble with one of the drives, and although no data was lost and I'm not that precious about the data on the drives, it would still be a little bothersome if I had to replace any lost data.
So that got me thinking about RAID5/6 and ZFS and after a little research the fact that neither will usefully support online capacity expansion is a bit of a show-stopper for me. Yes I know you can add vdevs to a zpool and you can grow arrays by replacing all of the drives with larger variants, but what I'm far more likely to want to do is simply add another drive to the storage pool and take advantage of that additional space straight away.
My conclusion at the moment is that something like FlexRAID or SnapRAID is the best option. I can create the pool with drives that already contain data, and FlexRAID also offers some protection with a parity drive. The idea of periodic snapshotting is perfect for a media library that has relatively few changes day-to-day. However, it does worry me slightly that to my mind there's some witchcraft going on under the hood and I'm not sure how easily I'd be able to get at the data in a disaster.
So does anyone here have any experience with this sort of scenario? I'd love to hear your thoughts