On 02/19/2011 12:23 AM, David Christensen wrote:
On 02/18/2011 08:36 PM, Jim Green wrote:I have a laptop with 120G harddrive, 2x320G external harddrive, I don't have a desktop. Now I am doing something serious storing some huge historical data to mysql database and want to have some better storage solution ... I have two options 1, buy a desktop with 4x2T harddrives and use lvm on raid1, I need the redundancy of data. 2, buy some independent storage like NAS, buy another desktop with small harddrive to access the NAS, debian installed on NAS and desktop of course. what do you think would be a better solution for me?On 02/18/2011 08:50 PM, Ron Johnson wrote: > Option 3: Multi-drive external USB enclosure. Gives you the capacity > of a NAS at 1/3 the cost. I prefer the responsiveness of data drives inside the machine using the data, especially with hardware-based RAID.
Sure. But that means you must buy a desktop (probably with a large tower case).
Think about how you're going to back up 4 TB (?) of data. You might want to put two drives in your desktop with hardware RAID0 and two into a backup server with LVM JBOD (so you can add more drives later without having to wipe the existing backups). You might also want to have some external device that you can dump the backup to periodically and store off-site.
Or a 2nd external enclosure ("first" if you buy a tower PC) for your backups. You can then buy slower "green" drives for it.
If he's wedded to his laptop, I'd buy 2 of the 4-drive USB enclosures and populate one with 7200RPM "normal" drives and the other with 5900RPM "green" drives.
Wed each pair with md and/or lvm.If OP ever decides he needs the speed of a desktop-tower, then he can directly move the 7200RPM drives into the tower.
bonnie++ is very useful for benchmarking multiple drive configuration options: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/bonnie++
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