On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 11:50:30AM +1000, Trent W. Buck wrote:
Robin Humble <rjh+luv@cita.utoronto.ca> writes:
I'm back to using single large drives (with spun-down or offline backups) at home 'cos I don't like the power usage and noise of lots of raid drives. few *3tb is enough - I don't need 24tb always online.
essentially I'm doing raid1 but with very delayed and power-friendly mirroring, and am prepared to do a fair bit of work and/or lose some data when I get unreadable sectors.
Are you doing that manually (e.g. a daily cron job calling rsync or dd), or do you have something like mdadm --write-behind=BIGNUM?
nothing clever, just manually. overly manually. every week or so I power on the backup box and run some rsyncs. it'd be possible to automate it (script that runs on power-up) but I haven't bothered. I actually kinda like a >>1day gap between backups as it gives me a window to retrieve files that I deleted by mistake. a fraction of a day is a bit short to realise that a file is gone and to look for it in the backups. incremental backups would work better, but so far I've been too lazy to work out a way to filter out fewGB tv shows that I've watched and deleted and don't want in any incrementals. BTW even a spun down external USB disk uses about 1 to 1.5W (I guess there's a litle arm chip @idle in there somewhere) so I use one of those for 'nearline', wheras the backups are truly off. the next power conserving project is to get tv recording and viewing working from one or 2 or 3 arm boxes (record, nas, view? ~1-5W each) instead of all being done by one big x86 (~70W). alternatively I might rip apart a cheap hdmi x86 laptop for its low power motherboard (15-30W?), add bigger drives (boot off usb, internal 3tb & dvd, external 3tb usb?), and use that as an all-in-one. sadly low power x86 laptop chips in desktop motherboards doesn't seem to be common. arm is lower power but intel makes the 1080p hdmi part of the htpc really easy (and I can still use mplayer) wheras it seems a mess and kinda marginal with limited choices of codec and players on all the linux arm trinkets I can find. cheers, robin