Well, all the bits finally turned up! I haven’t actually much yet apart from making a few decisions, and taking a few pictures:

• Can’t run my backup on Windows XP x86 – it doesn’t support more than 2TiB, so looking at a second Linux box. For the moment, my backups are going on the 3 separate 1TB drives I already have.
• XFS seems great, but doesn’t care about bad blocks. Similar with JFS, although I haven’t been able to find out details. EXT3 seems the best bet, but if the FS goes over 8TiB, I’m going to have trouble
• Software RAID is better than hardware in some terms – specifically in diagnosis. You can actually check temperature and SMART status per drive.
• oh, and with hardware, you can’t span an array across multiple controllers
• There’s a way to automatically check for Bad Blocks – see here
• MDRaid seems to be the best way for software RAID
  
• Fill all the drives with data, and randomly corrupt sdX and mdX, see if it can cope – and randomly remove one drive, see what happens

Ok, on with the geek pr0n. Enjoy some pictures of what I’ve got so far. Very impressed with the case too actually!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 8:19 pm and is filed under General, Personal, RAID Array, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.