12 TB Array... No, that's not cool... PALIMPSEST IS!
Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 9:52 pm
Now is this sweet or what?
I already had a 6 TB raid 5 box attached to my Mythtv backend. It's one of those cheapie mini towers that has two esata ports connecting to a special interface card stuck in your computer. Yeah, I know... software raid but it worked perfectly, is cheap and has 8 bays.
For almost a year, I've been running a 6 TB software raid with 4 Samsung 2 TB drives. I always knew it was possible to GROW the damned thing and held off buying new drives because of the drama. Well this past week, newegg had a sale on some 2TB drives and I picked up three more.
I thought I would have a whole weekend of of learning CLI commands for raid work building and re-sizing the array and the associated angst of halting the raid for maintenance and thus taking down my backend server. BUT NO!!!
I loaded PALIMSEST to monitor the drives as I inserted them into the raid box and ensure they were good. Guess what?!?!? After verifying that all the drives were in working condition there was a simple button on the panel for "Edit Components." It can't be this easy I thought. Well I pressed the button and was given two choices. These were to add hot spares or grow the array. I clicked the three new drives and pressed go and what the hey!!! It's rebuilding and re-sizing the array as I type this. I'm still recording to the drives and able to view content off the raid... I know this may take a few days to finish the rebuilding of the raid but I don't have to even power down or halt the raid.
So, soon I will have 12 TB of space to fill. God, can I even do that? Is there enough TV in the world?
Simply amazing... Gnome Utilities do make it easy... So freaking SWEET!!!
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Update: 24 hours later.... about a quarter the way through reshaping array... I read this will take a while and it is. Still functioning perfectly!
Marc
I already had a 6 TB raid 5 box attached to my Mythtv backend. It's one of those cheapie mini towers that has two esata ports connecting to a special interface card stuck in your computer. Yeah, I know... software raid but it worked perfectly, is cheap and has 8 bays.
For almost a year, I've been running a 6 TB software raid with 4 Samsung 2 TB drives. I always knew it was possible to GROW the damned thing and held off buying new drives because of the drama. Well this past week, newegg had a sale on some 2TB drives and I picked up three more.
I thought I would have a whole weekend of of learning CLI commands for raid work building and re-sizing the array and the associated angst of halting the raid for maintenance and thus taking down my backend server. BUT NO!!!
I loaded PALIMSEST to monitor the drives as I inserted them into the raid box and ensure they were good. Guess what?!?!? After verifying that all the drives were in working condition there was a simple button on the panel for "Edit Components." It can't be this easy I thought. Well I pressed the button and was given two choices. These were to add hot spares or grow the array. I clicked the three new drives and pressed go and what the hey!!! It's rebuilding and re-sizing the array as I type this. I'm still recording to the drives and able to view content off the raid... I know this may take a few days to finish the rebuilding of the raid but I don't have to even power down or halt the raid.
So, soon I will have 12 TB of space to fill. God, can I even do that? Is there enough TV in the world?
Simply amazing... Gnome Utilities do make it easy... So freaking SWEET!!!
-----------------------------------------------------
Update: 24 hours later.... about a quarter the way through reshaping array... I read this will take a while and it is. Still functioning perfectly!
Marc