making a huge fileserver
Hi folks, I know this may be not the right place to ask, but I thought
I'd give it a try.
I'm trying to build a fileserver. A small, but extensible one. I plan to
start with 500GB and grow from there. Obviously, I want redundancy, so I
want it to be a software RAID. I don't care too much about performance
because I'll read those files over a low traffic network.
I think the RAID level I want is RAID-5, which, if I understand
correctly, lets me have an arbitrary number of disks, as long as I have
3 or more. The filesystem of choice is XFS because I'd be storing big
files (think DVD ISOs, and worse yet: hard disk images for immediate
recovery) on the fileserver.
The question is: What are the possibilities for growth on that array? I
read that it is not easy to add more disks to a RAID-5, but that is just
what I want. Suppose I buy 3 320GB disks making a 640GB array. Then I
fill that up and just buy a new drive, grow the array, and grow the XFS
filesystem. Is that possible/stable/secure/production-ready?
Google suggested this: www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/LVM_on_RAID
But I think it's not what I want. I think the article says that I can
add more ARRAYS to the LVM. That is, every time I want to add a new
drive I'd need to buy 3 more. Is that so?
Cheers,
Hernan
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