hardware for home use large storage

[Dan Langille]

On 2/16/2010 6:28 AM, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Dan Langille wrote:
>> Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>>> Why even bother with the LSI card at all?
>>> That board already has 6 SATA slots - depends how many disks you want
>>> to use of course. (5 HDs + 1 DVD drive?)
>>
>> Plus two SATA drives in a gmirror for the base OS, and one optical. I
>> want a minimum of 8 slots.
>
> I think that 2 HDDs in gmirror just for base OS is an overkill if you
> want this machine as home storage. You will be fine with booting the
> base OS from CF card or USB stick. (and you can put two USB flash disks
> in gmirror if you want redundancy)
> This way you will save some money, SATA ports/cards and if you will use
> some kind of fast and big USB stick, you can use part of it as L2ARC for
> speeding up read performance of ZFS
> http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2010/02/10/making-zfs-faster/
>
> I have my backup storage machine booted from USB stick (as read-only
> UFS) with 4x 1TB HDDs in RAIDZ. It is running one and half year without
> problem.

I agree.  However, the machine will be primarily storage, but it will 
also be running PostgreSQL and Bacula.  I already have smaller unused 
SATA drives laying around here.

Thank you

-- 
Dan Langille - http://langille.org/