[Samba] Low cost additional storage on a Samba server

[John Drescher]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Gary Dale <garydale at rogers.com> wrote:
> Easiest way is to implement software RAID on your current server.
> - add 2 (or more) new drives partitioned identically to your current drive
> (unless you want to replace your existing drive)
>  - partition type is fd (RAID)
> - create RAID 5 arrays using the new drives & partitions (except for /boot
> which should be on a RAID 1 array)
>  - common setup is (but use whatever partition setup you currently have):
>    - /boot --> RAID 1
>   - / --> 20G RAID 5
>   - /home --> rest of space
>  - tell mdadm that 1 drive is missing from each array
> - copy the files from each partition on your current drive to the RAID
> partitions on the new array
> - update grub to use the new RAID arrays
> - reboot into new array
> - if it works, add your original drive (or its replacement) into the RAID
> array(s)
>
> Needless to say, back up everything before starting. Creating a RAID array
> is safe but mistakes happen and hardware fails.
>
> Benefit of RAID over NAS is
> - don't need to change client setups
> - can be expanded by adding new drives into array
> - speed on reads
> - protection against hard drive failure
>
> Google Linux RAID setup for detailed howtos.
>

That is pretty much what I do. In the spring of 2008 I was adding 4
TB+ raid 5 dual core servers (using 750GB drives) with 4 or 8GB of RAM
for under $2000 US. Now you can easily get a quad core with 7 or 8TB
for the same price..

I highly recommend linux software raid (unlike windows software raid
which is horribly broken performance wise) linux software raid
performs well. These 4.X TB raid 5 machines I bought in 2008 write at
over 200 MB/s and read at 300MB/s and they do this at less than 8 %
CPU usage on a single core.

John