SmilingInSeattle
Dabbler
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2012
- Messages
- 25
A couple of years ago I built a RaidZ1 file system with five 2TB disks. At the time I knew I would run out of storage and planned to replace the 2TB drives with 4TB drives to double the capacity. This file server supports NFS and CIFS shares and has a rather simple file structure: 5 directories below the root of the file system, then each of those has from 2 to 200 directories below that, then each of those directories house files. In all, right now, about 14000 files. But, after reading forums discussing how long it takes to resilver just a 500MB drive (and running on a degraded file system while each drive is resilvered,) I began to think about potential consequences of having a degraded system for as long as a month. I add about 100GB each month too.
So I'm looking at an alternative of adding an eSATA port multiplied "toaster," populating it with 5 more 2TB drives (1TB is the "sweet spot" in the marketplace right now. I expect 2TB drives to get to that point within 6 months unless Thailand experiences a severe monsoon season again this year) and creating a new pool. Going this route, I'd like to name the first level directories in the new pool with the same names as are found in the original pool.
If I go that route, to make share access transparent to users on machines mounting via NFS or sharing" via CIFS can I simply do that by creating soft symlinks at the highest level?
I manage the (headless) server, and do my writes from a desktop/workstation running linux. but wonder about the pros and cons of mounting. Thinking about it, I could create symlinks on the linux workstation and mount the two pools there or I could create symlinks on the FreeNAS server and mount one "common" name depending on which way I write the syslink command. Thinking this through further, I'm concerned my plan might not work. When I write then with symlinks I then wouldn't have control over the physical pool new files would be written to. Now, as I understand, this approach works under growing an LV, but I don't have an LV file system here.
I'm open to suggestions of other ways to accomplish this task of growing my storage as well as practical comments about how to implement what I've suggested.
Thank you for your comments in advance.
Server:
HP Proliant N40L
FreeNAS 9.1(RC1), RAIDZ1 (8TB)
Proposed espansion, Sans Digital TR5M, RAIDZ1 (8TB)
Workstation:
Homebuilt, Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS)
5 Various Hard drives: Ext2, Ext3, NTFS
Supported devices:
SamsungTV (QNX?)
Samsung BlueRay player (QNX?)
Windows XP
Windows7
iPhone
iTouch
HP Touchpad (WebOS & Android CryogenMod 10.2 (ICS4.1))
So I'm looking at an alternative of adding an eSATA port multiplied "toaster," populating it with 5 more 2TB drives (1TB is the "sweet spot" in the marketplace right now. I expect 2TB drives to get to that point within 6 months unless Thailand experiences a severe monsoon season again this year) and creating a new pool. Going this route, I'd like to name the first level directories in the new pool with the same names as are found in the original pool.
If I go that route, to make share access transparent to users on machines mounting via NFS or sharing" via CIFS can I simply do that by creating soft symlinks at the highest level?
I manage the (headless) server, and do my writes from a desktop/workstation running linux. but wonder about the pros and cons of mounting. Thinking about it, I could create symlinks on the linux workstation and mount the two pools there or I could create symlinks on the FreeNAS server and mount one "common" name depending on which way I write the syslink command. Thinking this through further, I'm concerned my plan might not work. When I write then with symlinks I then wouldn't have control over the physical pool new files would be written to. Now, as I understand, this approach works under growing an LV, but I don't have an LV file system here.
I'm open to suggestions of other ways to accomplish this task of growing my storage as well as practical comments about how to implement what I've suggested.
Thank you for your comments in advance.
Server:
HP Proliant N40L
FreeNAS 9.1(RC1), RAIDZ1 (8TB)
Proposed espansion, Sans Digital TR5M, RAIDZ1 (8TB)
Workstation:
Homebuilt, Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS)
5 Various Hard drives: Ext2, Ext3, NTFS
Supported devices:
SamsungTV (QNX?)
Samsung BlueRay player (QNX?)
Windows XP
Windows7
iPhone
iTouch
HP Touchpad (WebOS & Android CryogenMod 10.2 (ICS4.1))