[mythtv-users] Storage best practices in 2017

Dan Ritter dsr-myth at randomstring.org
Thu Mar 23 19:34:35 UTC 2017


On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:50:45PM -0400, Mark wrote:
> 
>     
> I'm getting ready to rebuild my main backend system, which has served me faithfully for the last 5 years with near no downtime, functioning as a mythtv backend, NAS server, zoneminder, asterisk and a couple other functions.  I do all this to keep powered computers to a minimum and save a bit on power costs. 
> The storage as it is now consists of 4 1TB western digital drives in Raid 5 with LVM on top for mythtv storage of recordings and video/ripped dvds.  I also have 2 1TB drives in Raid 1 for critical stuff i don't want to lose and don't need the striping for performance.  
> I've decided the Raid 5 / LVM setup is too complex for what it is, and storage groups didn't exist when i originally built this rig.  
> I just picked up 2 4TB WDRed drives on the newegg hump day sale.  
> Looking for suggestions on where to go from here, with the following assumptions:  Video recordings/dvd rips i want to have some sort of protection from a drive fail.  Recordings i don't care as much.  
> What's the current thought on best practices for storage?  I had looked at ZFS for preventing bit-rot.  Not opposed to Raid still, but probably not that interested in the LVM combo anymore.
> Any thoughts?Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device


What I have now:

- 120 GB system disk
- 4 x 3TB storage disks, run as two separate mdadm RAID-1
  volumes, /store1 and /store2
- MythTV has storage dirs on both /store1/mythtv/ and
  /store2/mythtv.
- database runs on the system disk, whole system disk is coped each night to
  /store1/backups/root/

What I would build now, if I were about to rebuild:

- 2 x 240 GB SSDs, with 4 partitions each:
  ext4 on mdadm RAID1: /boot (5G)
  ext4 on mdadm RAID1: / (180G)
  reserved for ZIL (5G)
  reserved for L2ARC (10G)

 Yes, that leaves 40G unpartitioned.

- 4 x 4-5 TB 7200RPM spinning disks, as 2 mirror VDEVs for RAID10, depending
  on what I can afford.

Then I would set up a ZFS filesystem for mythtv with a quota of
about 90% of the underlying space and compression turned off.

Root and boot get backed up nightly. 

This should be reasonably fast, even when we have 3 HD channels
being recorded and 2-3 people watching simultaneously. It will
fit into a mid-tower case (4x3.5", 2x2.5") and won't be too loud
even if I want to use it as a frontend as well.

ZFS on Linux is at an appropriate stage of maturity, now.

-dsr-


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