On Sunday, 20 May 2018 2:01:14 PM AEST Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
In the morning I will install the 2 new 2Tb HDDs , and load the DVD to launch myself into unfamiliar territory, so when I get to the partition stage of the process I will have 1 x 1Tb HDD for the system and /home and the 2 x 2Tb drives for the RAID.
Is there any reason why you want your OS on a single separate drive with no RAID?
Some people think that it's only worth using RAID for things that you can't lose. But RAID also offers convenience. If your system with RAID has one disk die you would probably like it to keep running while you go to the shop to buy a new disk.
If I were you, I'd either get rid of the 1TB drive (or use it as extra storage space for unimportant files) or replace it with a third 2TB drive for a three-way mirror - or perhaps RAID-5 (mdadm) or RAID-Z1 (zfs) if storage capacity is more important than speed.
I expect that if he's just starting out with RAID then he doesn't even have 2TB of data to store.
One thing I very strongly recommend is that you get some practice with mdadm or LVM or ZFS before you do anything to your system. If you have KVM or Virtualbox installed, this is easy. If not, install & configure libvirt + KVM and it will be easy. BTW, virt-manager is a nice GUI front-end for KVM.
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2015/08/18/btrfs-training/ A few years ago I ran a LUV training session on BTRFS and ZFS which included deliberately corrupting disks to be prepared for real life corruption. I think this is worth doing. Everyone knows that backups aren't much good unless they are tested and the same applies to data integrity features of filesystems.
A /boot filesystem isn't really necessary these days, but I like to have one. It gives me a standard, common filesystem type (ext4) to put ISOs (e.g. a rescue disk or gparted or clonezilla) that can be booted directly from grub with memdisk.
If you want to have a Linux software RAID-1 for the root filesystem then a separate filesystem for /boot doesn't give much benefit. If you want to use BTRFS or ZFS for root then you want a separate /boot. You can have /boot on BTRFS but that seems likely to give you more pain than you want for no apparent benefit. On Sunday, 20 May 2018 10:27:53 AM AEST Mike O'Connor via luv-main wrote:
I suggest the following. 1. Do not use ZFS unless you have ECC ram
If you use a filesystem like BTRFS or ZFS and have memory errors then it will become apparent fairly quickly so you can then restore from backups. If you use a filesystem like Ext4 and have memory errors then you can have your data become increasingly corrupt for an extended period of time before you realise it.
2. btrfs has real issues in a number of area so unless you are very experienced I would not use it.
If you use the basic functionality and only RAID-1 (not RAID-5 or RAID-6) then it's pretty solid. I've been running my servers on BTRFS for years without problems.
So why do it this way ? Well LVMs give a lot of options which as not available if there not there. This site has only a very simple example but give it a read http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/benefitsoflvmsmall.html
That document says "Joe buys a PC with an 8.4 Gigabyte disk". I just checked the MSY pricelist, the smallest disk they sell is 1TB and the smallest SSD they sell is 120G. Any document referencing 8G disks is well out of date. https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html The above document explains the 8.4G limit. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/