On 18/04/12 14:06, Russell Coker wrote:
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/04/17/zfs-btrfs-cheap-servers/ Interesting read. It was actually the T410 that I had spec'ed from Dell. Why do you want a redundant PSU and hot-plug disks? If it's a home server then why not just take some downtime if a PSU fails and schedule downtime for disk replacement? A few years ago, downtime of the server wouldn't have been an issue. These days the server is used for all phones, TV, Internet connection, Lighting control (CBus). We're in the bush without a decent computer store nearby so a failed PSU is likely 1-2 days downtime. Hot-plug disks is mainly a convenience. Not only from replacement of failed disks but also upgrading of each disk in the array with larger disks sometime in the future which would be a pain without hot-plug disks. http://www.graysonline.com/
Check out Grays, they have lots of refurbished and ex-demo servers from big name companies. I've bought a few HP servers from them and was pleased by the result. I'll check them out, thanks. Why aren't you using BTRFS or ZFS?
As an aside, I'm trying to avoid upgrading some of my servers until I feel that BTRFS is ready to use on them. I'd rather implement a new filesystem and new disks at the same time. One of my servers has a RAID-1 array of 1TB disks and I'm planning to make it a BTRFS RAID-1 of 4TB disks some time after Wheezy is released. I hadn't realised the functionality of these filesystems extended to raid. I'll have to investigate these further. However the lack of raid 5 or 6 would probably rule out BTRFS for me.
Cheers, Dave.