HI I have a small home server (photos, videos, music) that is reaching full capacity. It is a 750GB, partitioned as a 50G OS and 700G Data + swap
The mobo, an Intel DG31PR mobo has 1 PATA and 4 SATA ports (3GB/s).
Currently it is running FC20, having been continuously upgraded from almost Fedora 1 I think
I got a 2TB WD red HDD for it.
My plan is to put the OS on a USB stick ( San Disk Low Profile 64GB SDCZ33-064G-B35 ) and use the whole 2TB for Data. I'd rather not have a PATA SDD, and I do not want to lose one of the SATA ports. Eventually I want to have a system with 4 HDDs, in a Raid 1+0 configuration to prevent data loss.
I have some questions. 1. I could use ext4 on all HDDs eventually. But I wonder, can I use ZFS? Specially I would like to have the ability to expand the single HDD into a Raid once I get the second HDD as painlessly as possible. If I use ext4 I guess I will have to backup/create raid system/reformat/restore the data. I have the idea that zfs only needs to be aware that there is a new drive and it will expand the filesystem accordingly. I'd rather not use LVM. I was burned by it once. 2. Is the USB OS ok? I do not feel I am losing that much, after all, it is a system that will be mostly on at home. 3.Should I add hibernation to it? How quickly will it come back from hibernation if someone requests data?
Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration?
Thanks!
JP
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 12:44:02PM -0500, Javier Perez wrote:
HI I have a small home server (photos, videos, music) that is reaching full capacity. It is a 750GB, partitioned as a 50G OS and 700G Data + swap The mobo, an Intel DG31PR mobo has 1 PATA and 4 SATA ports (3GB/s). Currently it is running FC20, having been continuously upgraded from almost Fedora 1 I think I got a 2TB WD red HDD for it. My plan is to put the OS on a USB stick ( San Disk Low Profile 64GB SDCZ33-064G-B35 ) and use the whole 2TB for Data. I'd rather not have a PATA SDD, and I do not want to lose one of the SATA ports. Eventually I want to have a system with 4 HDDs, in a Raid 1+0 configuration to prevent data loss. I have some questions.
- I could use ext4 on all HDDs eventually. But I wonder, can I use
ZFS? Specially I would like to have the ability to expand the single HDD into a Raid once I get the second HDD as painlessly as possible. If I use ext4 I guess I will have to backup/create raid
though I can't tell you the steps, it is possible to build a raid-1 array using Linux Raid, with only one drive. it'll be in "degraded" mode because of only one drive, but you could then easily (??) add a second or subsequent drive to the array. Instructions (more or less) abound on the web.
system/reformat/restore the data. I have the idea that zfs only needs to be aware that there is a new drive and it will expand the filesystem accordingly. I'd rather not use LVM. I was burned by it once. 2. Is the USB OS ok? I do not feel I am losing that much, after all, it is a system that will be mostly on at home. 3.Should I add hibernation to it? How quickly will it come back from hibernation if someone requests data? Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration? Thanks!
On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote:
Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration?
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
- I could use ext4 on all HDDs eventually. But I wonder, can I use ZFS?
Specially I would like to have the ability to expand the single HDD into a Raid once I get the second HDD as painlessly as possible. If I use ext4 I guess I will have to backup/create raid system/reformat/restore the data. I have the idea that zfs only needs to be aware that there is a new drive and it will expand the filesystem accordingly. I'd rather not use LVM. I was burned by it once.
Or, you can use BTRFS, which gives you all the advantages of LVM without LVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxWuaozpe2I
Dec 2012 SUSE Enterprise considers BTRFS production-ready http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI0Nzc
March 2014 OpenSUSE 13.2 To Use Btrfs By Default http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYzNjA
"RHEL 7 will also include the Btrfs file system as a tech preview" http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/red-hat-enterprise-linux-7-enters-beta.... FC
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about
0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer >than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us wrote:
On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote:
Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration?
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
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On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 14:02:47 -0400, Fred Smith fredex@fcshome.stoneham.ma.us wrote:
though I can't tell you the steps, it is possible to build a raid-1 array using Linux Raid, with only one drive. it'll be in "degraded" mode because of only one drive, but you could then easily (??) add a second or subsequent drive to the array. Instructions (more or less) abound on the web.
It doesn't need to be in degraded mode. You can use the force option to set it to only have one device. If your going to set it up for an install, I think you'll need to do that. I don't believe anaconda will let you put stuff on a degraded array. You'll still need to set it up before running anaconda, as anaconda will not let you create 1 device arrays.
This won't work for raid 0 and as far as I can tell, mdadm won't let you add or remove devices from raid 10 arrays either.
On 04/28/2014 02:11 PM, Javier Perez wrote:
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up
about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer >than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system.
The get a 64Gb SSD internal as you primary device and put all data on a secondary drive.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Joe Zeff <joe@zeff.us mailto:joe@zeff.us> wrote:
On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote: Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration? Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org <mailto:users@lists.fedoraproject.org> To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org--
/_/\ |O O| pepebuho@gmail.com mailto:pepebuho@gmail.com
~~~~ While the night runs ~~~~ toward the day... m m Pepebuho watches from his high perch.
Hi Robert.
The get a 64Gb SSD internal as you primary device and put all data on a
secondary drive.
If I do that I lose one SATA port out of the 4 that the motherboard has.
I want to slowly upgrade it to a Raid 1+0 system, unless there is a better option. Will ZFS on two mirrored HDDs be a viable option?
JP
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Robert Moskowitz rgm@htt-consult.comwrote:
On 04/28/2014 02:11 PM, Javier Perez wrote:
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about
0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer >than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system.
The get a 64Gb SSD internal as you primary device and put all data on a secondary drive.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us wrote:
On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote:
Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration?
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
-- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
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/_/\ |O O| pepebuho@gmail.com
~~~~ While the night runs ~~~~ toward the day... m m Pepebuho watches from his high perch. -- users mailing list users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
| From: Joe Zeff joe@zeff.us
| On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote: | > | > Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration? | | Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% | of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external | drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
I agree.
I always reserve two partitions to be /: one for the current system, and one for the next system. That way I can install a new system without losing the old one. Seems much safer to me. Oh, and I allocate 20G per / to account for future code-bloat. Surely overkill on a server.
I don't really know RAID best-practices these days.
Big disks are so big that there is a real chance of losing a working drive while rebuilding a degraded array. And manufacturers of consumer drives try to make them NOT work in RAID so as to force business folks to buy more expensive drives (google for TLER).
When a disk fails, the array becomes degraded. The redundancy is gone.
The first thing to do: replace the bad disk and rebuild the array. Or try to rebuild with the old drive (the error might be transient).
Rebuilding can take a large fraction of a day with 3T disks.
During that time, a second failure kills you: no redundancy.
The fundamental problem is the flawed belief that RAID is a kind of backup. When you get down to it, it isn't backup.
So ask yourself: in a home server, just what does RAID give me? Are you really bottlenecked for speed in a way that RAID will improve? Perhaps RAID can help with High Availability (and perhaps not) -- is that what you are hoping for? Just don't think of it as backup.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com wrote:
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer >than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system.
IMHO this is a terrible idea. A $10 USB stick is not the same as a real SSD. The I/O speeds, especially write speeds, are very different (for one thing the SSD is connected via a SATA interface, not a USB port). Also, a USB stick will wear out a lot quicker if it's used as a root filesystem with /tmp. Either buy a proper SSD or use a partition on the rotating drive. Note that a real SSD can go about twice as fast as a SATA 2 port, which is probably what you have on your machine, but it will still be dramatically faster than a USB stick.
poc
| From: Javier Perez pepebuho@gmail.com
| I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to | give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system.
I could be wrong, but I think
- most USB sticks are quite slow.
- USB2 sticks are guaranteed to be slow-ish
- USB sticks seem to have low reliability. The seem to be designed for a different usage pattern (not continuous).
- I've had trouble booting from USB3 sticks in USB3 ports. I think that some BIOSes are not ready for this.
- USB sticks are easy to knock because they stick out of the port
On the other hand, once the server has gotten through startup
- for many server applications, access to things that would live on a USB stick are such that RAM caching makes the performance less important.
On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 3:56 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan@gmail.com wrote:
Also, a USB stick will wear out a lot quicker if it's used as a root filesystem with /tmp.
Well, I've been waiting for Samsung F2FS for a long time, but still no boot support AFAIK http://www.techspot.com/news/50428-samsung-creates-flash-friendly-open-sourc...
on the rotating drive. Note that a real SSD can go about twice as fast as a SATA 2 port, which is probably what you have on your machine, but it will still be dramatically faster than a USB stick.
But there are USB 3.0 sticks too, the difference is narrower then than USB 2.0 ports :)
FC
On 28.04.2014, Javier Perez wrote:
My plan is to put the OS on a USB stick
In my experience, that's a bad idea. USB-sticks are not reliable over a longer period, and you can expect data loss.
and use the whole 2TB for Data. I'd rather not have a PATA SDD, and I do not want to lose one of the SATA ports. Eventually I want to have a system with 4 HDDs, in a Raid 1+0 configuration to prevent data loss.
Just put the OS on one of the SATA disks.
- I could use ext4 on all HDDs eventually. But I wonder, can I use ZFS?
Specially I would like to have the ability to expand the single HDD into a Raid once I get the second HDD as painlessly as possible.
While I'm with you to not use LVM, what's the problem with rsync'ing your data to your new disks? And be aware that I'm highly biased as a long time user of XFS, but that's what I would suggest. What matters is reliability, and nothing beats XFS. Period :-)
- Is the USB OS ok? I do not feel I am losing that much, after all, it is
a system that will be mostly on at home.
S.a. I would never use it.
3.Should I add hibernation to it? How quickly will it come back from hibernation if someone requests data?
S2D takes almost as long as a full reboot, and has shown to not be reliable on some machines. S2R would be an alternative.
Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration?
Keep it simple. Just put the OS on one of the disks, use XFS and be happy :-)
So ask yourself: in a home server, just what does RAID give me? Are
you really bottlenecked for speed in a way that RAID will improve? Perhaps RAID can help with High Availability (and perhaps not) -- is that what you are hoping for? Just don't think of it as backup. --
Hmm, I was looking at it more as a High Availability than backup. I already have a 2TB external disk for backup. at least my experience so far with the current Caviar Blue 750G has been good (5+ years, no problems), The replacement is a Caviar Red so in theory it should be more reliable, maybe I can get away by not using a RAID ( dang, I really wanted to practice with one).
I guess four partitions (OS1, replacement OS1, swap and data) where data=ZFS system instead of ext4 should be more than enough. On the other hand, do I REALLY need ECC memory to make ZFS work as this article suggests? ( http://www.firewing1.com/howtos/fedora-20/installing-zfs-and-setting-pool)
JP
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On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 03:44:26PM -0500, Javier Perez wrote:
So ask yourself: in a home server, just what does RAID give me? Are
you really bottlenecked for speed in a way that RAID will improve? Perhaps RAID can help with High Availability (and perhaps not) -- is that what you are hoping for? Just don't think of it as backup. --
Hmm, I was looking at it more as a High Availability than backup. I already have a 2TB external disk for backup. at least my experience so far with the current Caviar Blue 750G has been good (5+ years, no problems), The replacement is a Caviar Red so in theory it should be more reliable, maybe I can get away by not using a RAID ( dang, I really wanted to practice with one).
I'm not sure Red is more reliable than Black. The Black drives have 5 yr warranties, whereas the Red drives have 3 yrs.
On Mon, 2014-04-28 at 16:18 -0300, Fernando Cassia wrote:
on the rotating drive. Note that a real SSD can go about twice as
fast
as a SATA 2 port, which is probably what you have on your machine,
but
it will still be dramatically faster than a USB stick.
But there are USB 3.0 sticks too, the difference is narrower then than USB 2.0 ports :)
Even a USB 3 stick can't be faster than the port it's on. According to the OP's description, this is a machine which started life in the Fedora 1 days, when USB 3 wasn't even specified.
poc
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On 04/28/14 14:11, Javier Perez wrote:
Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about
0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer >than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.
I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system.
My $0.02. IIRC, I don't think ZFS is supported (or fully supported at any rate) in linux. I just did some research into that and couldn't find anything recent about ZFS support for newer kernels. Granted, I could have just missed it. If you want to use ZFS on that box for data storage, look at FreeNAS. It's fantastic. Of course, it would render that box unusable as a desktop for the most part, but there are various Linux distros that can be run in 'jails' on it that may or may not work for your needs.
Second, I wouldn't use a flash drive as your OS drive for a couple of reasons. We've used flash drives as test devices for some ARM boards and the stability wasn't what you would expect. Especially if there is 'normal' OS activity. We ended up having to move nearly all the log files off the flash drive onto secondary storage to keep the drive stable. If you're worried about running out of SATA ports and have a spare PCI/PCIe slot, just add a SATA board. I had to do that with my server at home. It makes more sense to have the OS on small partition either on a mirrored small pair of SATA SSDs rather than a single flash drive.
On 4/29/2014 5:30 AM, Mark Haney wrote:
My $0.02. IIRC, I don't think ZFS is supported (or fully supported at any rate) in linux. I just did some research into that and couldn't find anything recent about ZFS support for newer kernels. Granted, I could have just missed it. If you want to use ZFS on that box for data storage, look at FreeNAS. It's fantastic. Of course, it would render that box unusable as a desktop for the most part, but there are various Linux distros that can be run in 'jails' on it that may or may not work for your needs.
Hello, Because of license incompatibility zfs can not be distributed with the linux kernel. However a work around as been found by providing zfs as a kernel module,etc and ZFS for linux is ready for wide spectrum deployment; from desktop to supercomputers.
https://groups.google.com/a/zfsonlinux.org/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/zfs-an... http://zfsonlinux.org/
Forget USB stick as OS device as it told by others :)
If you want to keep SATA ports, you should add some more either connecting to a low profile pci/pcie card or maybe to use some msata add-on card. It is fast, reliable and not so expensive
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