On 2021-01-22 14:26, mick crane wrote:
hello, I want to tidy things up as suggested.Have one old PC that I'll put 2 disks in and tidy everything up so what's scattered about is on the running disks and this new/old one is just backup for them. Can I assume that Debian installer in some expert mode will sort out the raid or do I need to install to one disk and then mirror it manually before invoking the raid thing ?
I would install a small SSD and do a fresh install of the OS onto that.I would then install the two HDD's and set up a mirror (RAID 1). Linux options include Multiple Device md(4), Linux Volume Manager lvm(8), and ZFS zfs(8).
A key issue with storage is bit rot. btrfs and ZFS have it. dm-integrity (man page?) can provide it for Linux solutions without. btrfs requires maintenance. I did not do it, and my disks suffered. ZFS does not require maintenance and has many killer features. I have not tried dm-integrity, but would be interested in reading a HOWTO for Debian.
Due to CDDL and GPL licensing conflicts, ZFS is not fully integrated into Debian. ZFS can be installed and used on Debian, but ZFS-on-root is not supported by the Debian installer.
The CDDL and BSD licenses are compatible. So, ZFS is fully integrated on FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD installer can do ZFS-on-root. FreeBSD has other features I like. I use FreeBSD and ZFS on my servers; including storage (Samba).
David