[Tfug] NAS suggestions

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Bender,

On 10/20/2012 11:39 AM, Bender wrote:
> I hesitate to say anything but...
> unraid works for me

<lime-technology.com> ?

I'll take a look at it.

> One parity drive is used for redundancy.
> Each data disk contains native format data (volumes not striped across
> disks)

So, the parity drive is your weak point?  Though, presumably,
if it fails, you can cross your fingers and hope the "data"
drives are intact?

> Logical volumes can span across physical disks

I suspect if one of those physical drives craps out, any volumes
that straddle it are hosed?

> Energy /thermally efficient - only need to spin up the drive you want to
> get/write data from/to (plus parity drve)
> raid 4 but not striped
>
> Can use a bunch of drives you have lying around to build volumes up to
> the capacity of your parity drive.
>
> distro is mnimalist - just for a nas role

How long have you been running it -- and how much data do you
have under its management?  Have you asked the subsystem what sorts
of errors it has *detected* in that usage history?  (i.e., is it
really buying you anything?)

> *not* free.
> but an *untimebombed* version is available to evaluate
> full featured, but number of disks limited
>
> FWIW...

Thanks, I'll take a look at it.  I threw a 4xUSB2 card in a box
and started building a *NetBSD* system on it just to give me
a benchmark for where I can go with just USB2, NFS, CIFS, etc.
Hopefully, I can finish that up tonight and then step over to
a current *FreeBSD* release and repeat the exercise (still
hunting for USB3 options).

--don