[mythtv-users] Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009

David Brodbeck gull at gull.us
Thu Oct 23 21:49:50 UTC 2008


Yeechang Lee wrote:
> I'd love to use ZFS, but there's no sign it's going to be incorporated
> into the Linux kernel anytime soon. I'd have to build and maintain an
> OpenSolaris box just for ZFS, and although I'm open to it given ZFS's
> benefits it'd mean I wouldn't be able to run a slave backend on it.

Unfortunately, that's probably never going to happen because of license
politics.  Linux is caged in by the GPL; ZFS is under a license that
isn't GPL-compatible.  (It's BSD-compatible, though, and I understand
FreeBSD has fairly stable ZFS support.)  Sun also has patents on several
of the important concepts, which makes a clean-room implementation unlikely.

> As has been noted several times here, tape backup of terabyte arrays
> of MythTV recordings is simply uneconomical even were it desired. The
> cheapest way, by far, is another identical array.

Tape backup in general only makes sense if you're planning on sending
tapes offsite, IMHO.  Otherwise disk-to-disk backup is almost always
cheaper per gigabyte and far less labor-intensive.



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