[mythtv-users] Recommendations requested for new HUGE server storage / myth

[Yan Seiner]

Mark wrote:
> Can anyone provide some wisdom on this? 
> I'm moving into a new house shortly.  I've been running Myth for a few 
> years on a combined  frontend/backend AMD 3200.
> Been recording SD only off of a couple of Dish network boxes.  the new 
> house has a server closet in the basement.
> I'm taking advantage of the move to transition to a new server backend 
> in the closet, and go HD.
> The server will have not just myth on it, but also email server, web 
> server, asterisk, file server, etc.  A do everything box.
>
> I bought a supermicro motherboard with a bunch of PCI slots, and a PCI-X 
> slot. 
> Intel Q6700 quad core mainly to have horsepower for transcoding when I 
> wanted it.
> This box will not display myth, only do server duty. 
> I have 4 Western Digital 1TB SATA disks coming.
> My thought was to have those be data storage, and get a separate smaller 
> drive for
> OS and applications.  The motherboard has 4 ports for SATA, and a single 
> IDE port.
> So I got to thinking I might just get a RAID card and move the data to 
> that.  I can get
> an HP/Adaptec 2610 6-port card for less than a $100 on Ebay.  It's not 
> state of the art,
> but I don't necessarily need super speed for a myth array.   Heck, I 
> don't even need Raid
> for Myth, but I DO want some form of raid/backup for my data, which is 
> stuff I can't easily
> replace.  So I thought I'd do some sort of smaller Raid 1 or 5 for data, 
> and the rest JBOD
> for myth storage, keeping the database on the OS drive.
> I think that there's a 2TB limit or something so I need to split it up?
> Anyways, I'm sure some of you out there have huge arrays setup for this 
> sort of thing, or even
> may be network admins, (I'm not, just a tinkerer) who can give some 
> advise on this.
>
> Main goals:
> 1.  Protect data (500-700 GB estimate)
> 2.  Reliable Myth storage
> 3.  Future expansion (I don't want to start out maxed on the motherboard)
> 4.  Not crazy hard to admin.
>
> I know that google is my friend.  I've been doing it for days.  But a 
> lot of it is not myth-centric.
> School me please!
>   

I run a mixed-use server:

4 monitors for 4 user sessions
3 sound cards
mythbackend
webserver
commercial backup box
mail server

So here's how my data is set up:

/dev/md0                964408    524688    390728  58% /
tmpfs                  3066832         0   3066832   0% /dev/shm
/dev/md1                241036     57294    171298  26% /boot
/dev/md5              15860120  13348256   1706212  89% /home
/dev/md2               1928852     41484   1789384   3% /tmp
/dev/md3               7692776   5700348   1601656  79% /usr
/dev/md4               7692776   4937036   2364968  68% /var
/dev/md10            1538311980 640301616 898006268  42% /data
/dev/md20            1922866224 1331647516 493542716  73% /data/mythtv


all the /dev/md? partitions are on RAID-1 15K scsi drives.  This puts my 
OS on fast drives, and on a completely separate bus from the rest of the 
system.

/dev/md10 is my home dirs and my commercial backup space - it runs on 6 
- 400GB sata drives on the mobo.

/dev/md20 is the large, slow eSATA storage in a RAID-5 setup.  It 
actually sits in a 20 slot hot swap case with 4 esata port multipliers, 
so I have lots of room to grow.  :-)

The mobo is an Asus M2N SLI Deluxe, which has proven absolutely rock 
solid.  I hammered it really hard here lately - dumping data from md10 
to md20 and from my old server via ethernet to md10, all the while doing 
the rebuild on md20, and it barely broke a sweat.

In other words, I don't know if you need a RAID card - I'm using mobo 
sata and esata connectors and linux kernel raid.