<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">><br>> Personally, I'd opt for option two (since you'll likely end up with bigger
<br>> drives), but either way, it's the best way to go for a robust, scalable<br>> storage solution, IMHO.<br>><br><br>How scalable is that really? How many drives are you stuffing in a case?</blockquote><div><br>
That depends on the case. :) 6 drives for a good size case is, I think not unreasonable, although heat dissipation (and maybe power?) could become a problem. Of course, if your case hits capacity, you can always buy a couple new, big drives (since they just keep getting bigger) and swap out an old, small RAID with a new, bigger one.
<br><br>The problem, really, is that if you want to scale a single filesystem, you need LVM. And to make LVM safe, AFAIK, you have to build it over some redundancy layer (though, I'm no LVM expert). RAID is the most obvious way to do this, and RAID-1 is the simplest way to build this redundancy.
<br><br>If you don't care about growth, RAID-5 gives you better storage efficiency, but of course, once it's built, that's it. It also requires at least 3 drives, so case size is still an issue.<br><br>Of course, you could always just go the backup route. But, if your server gets big enough, that in itself can become a problem.
<br><br>Really, it's all about weighing your options. I figure, I can get a bigger case and a more hefty power supply. In exchange, I can grow my system as I need to, and I needn't worry about a drive failure.<br><br>Brett.
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