external drive enclosures / esata / port multipliers?
Hello all,
I have two older PCs on my LAN posing as 'servers'... one running
FreeNAS off a USB stick using three 500GB hdds in a ZFS RAID-Z pool
serving as storage for the LAN and one running Debian Lenny with an 80GB
drive used as a general purpose 'tinker' box that I can ssh into, etc.
Problem is that the SMART report for one of those 500GB drives in the
FreeNAS box is showing some pre-failure attributes, and the whole array
is a little small anyways. Rather than simply replace one 500GB drive
with another 500GB drive, and still have no backup of the file server,
I'd like to upgrade all the drives to 2TB ones - but I have no where to
store that much data in the mean while. As such, I started looking at
getting a 4-bay external drive enclosure with an eSATA card for the
Debian box, with the hopes of creating a RAID5 + LVM setup using those
drives and backing the data up to that external drive enclosure. After
the backup is done, replace the drives in the FreeNAS box and rebuild
the array there and mirror the data back. Then, I'd have both the
primary storage (on the FreeNAS box) and a backup (which I don't have
currently) using the external drive enclosure on the Debian box.
My big question is... most of these external drive boxes seem to claim
support for JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, etc. - should I presume that is
simply fake RAID like many commodity mobos have, and not really usable
in Linux? In that case, with all the drives hanging off the one eSATA
connection, will Linux (specifically Debian Squeeze) see all four
drives, or just the first one? Will I be able to configure them in a
RAID5 array as desired?
Thanks,
Monte
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