Expanding storage solution - How?
Normally I just run straight disks without any raid and stuff, and make backups of important stuff, but I'm planning to invest in a new machine, and I wonder if there is some good solutions to what I want to do..
So, the machine is a 26 bay 2.5 inch 2U server. 2 bays in back (raid-1 ssds for OS and stuff). The other 24 bays I plan to fill with 4TB sas disks as my need for storage grows, and here is my questions :
Is there a good way to achieve some level of data security, who can easily expand? Let's say I setup a raid-5, with 1 disk parity. 5 disks for data, total 6 disks. Is it possible to add single disks to the same raid later down the road, to expand it, without nuking the files and rebuilding the raid? Or is there some fancy other solutions to achieve this?
I just want to keep putting in disks as I need them, but I want the peace of mind of having a disk failure possible, and I want to expand the same partition as I put in more disks.
Comments
Unraid/
Does anyone have experience with drive pool?
https://stablebit.com
From what I understand (and 15 minutes of running some testing), it can be setup to store files on 2 locations, and you can 1 click to add more storage. I tried this, and it seems to work. Not sure how it works in real life though. First hand experience wanted!
use mergerfs instead
Why?
I use stablebit on most of my windows servers and it works great very much recommended .. Lots of options for data redundancy or not with multiple drives.. very easy to add and delete drives as you go
Ended up with deploying this myself, with redundancy. So far so good. Did some testing with removing / adding disks while writing to the pool, and it seems to do exactly what I want it to do.