I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I’m planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively.
I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn’t lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I’m not sure how to do that, and I’m kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.
you would want to use the hardware raid that likely already exists. its been a minute since i setup dell, but you should be able to boot into the raid controller bios (some ctrl-key sequence) and configure your raid there… then you just install whatever you want on the defined logical drives (linux/windows/hypervsior)
@originalucifer @blackstampede if you can just do software raid and if possible get the disks to look like JBOD (just a bunch of disks) CPUs are so much faster these days software raid even ZFS offers so much more than hardware raid.
i wouldnt on a non-jbod, retail server box. if this was a random workstation without onboard hardware raid, then sure.
im not sure how you think sharing the main processor with the raid when there is already a perfectly good set of processors for the raid is going to be faster.
@originalucifer @blackstampede I’d rather ZFS for the data integrity stuff than anything else.
what specific feature of ZFS are you frothing over to sacrifice your primary processing for it?
the hardware raid in this box was designed for business and would be more than adequate for the requested purpose
You’re right, hardware RAID still has some use for businesses, but it’s generally a bad idea for consumers. The main reason is the procedure if the RAID controller fails. In commercial applications they have spare, compatible controllers, so a quick hardware swap and you’re back up and running, you don’t even need to rebuild the array. However, consumers generally don’t have a spare controller, and if they don’t, they can’t just get any controller, they need a compatible one or the array is lost. If a system running a software RAID has a hardware failure, the array can be moved to a new host and mdadm can rebuild the array without needing specific hardware.
but this guy is specifically not using consumer hardware
Yes, but they’re using it in a consumer setting. That was the whole point of my comment. It sounds like they may have 2 identical RAID controllers, which means they might have a spare. However, if one dies, they’d be looking at obtaining another spare, migrating their data to a new setup, or risking complete data loss.
Hardware raid is missing many features of modern software raid like ZFS. Expansion is harder, replication and snapshotting options don’t exist like they do on a COW raid, speed improvements with ZIL and caching aren’t there, the list goes on.
Ubuntu supports ZFS very well. And if you’re going software raid, for the love of dog, don’t use md. It’s ancient.
There’s nothing wrong with MD. It’s old but also rock solid. It’s super flexible, can do array configurations that can’t be done in other ways. And most importantly it decouples redundancy from other features and allows you to pick and choose your feature set.
Is there a way to checksum in md?
Depends what you mean by it. Some of the traditional RAID levels use stripe parity. If you mean file checksums then no, mdadmin only deals with disk devices, doesn’t deal with filesystems and below. You can use filesystems with built-in checksums or other methods. For example I use RAID1 and I take incremental backups with Borg.
