RAID setup for Ubuntu media server
RAID setup for Ubuntu media server
I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I'm planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively.
I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn't lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I'm not sure how to do that, and I'm kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.
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Hardware raid is missing many features of modern software raid like ZFS. Expansion is harder, replication and snapshotting options don't exist like they do on a COW raid, speed improvements with ZIL and caching aren't there, the list goes on.
Ubuntu supports ZFS very well. And if you're going software raid, for the love of dog, don't use md. It's ancient.
HW raid also screws you if the controller dies.
There's nothing wrong with MD. It's old but also rock solid. It's super flexible, can do array configurations that can't be done in other ways. And most importantly it decouples redundancy from other features and allows you to pick and choose your feature set.
Is there a way to checksum in md?
Depends what you mean by it. Some of the traditional RAID levels use stripe parity. If you mean file checksums then no, mdadmin only deals with disk devices, doesn't deal with filesystems and below. You can use filesystems with built-in checksums or other methods. For example I use RAID1 and I take incremental backups with Borg.