RAID1 array for our home theater. LVM + md + ZFS or XFS

 We built an 11 TB RAID1 array on an Archlinux system with five big hard drives.   We used btrfs.   It was easy to add drives when the file system was empty.   But when it was 80% full, it couldn't add drives any more.   This seems to be a bug with btrfs that nobody wants to talk about.


I will build a replacement array on Debian Buster or Bullseye, using the traditional Linux software RAID which is known to scale successfully to dozens of drives.   We will back up the 9 TB of content and wipe the old drives.   Or at least the first 1GB.   We will build the new array on the old drives

  • ZFS   snapshots

The new array will use pairs of partitions configured RAID1 for fault tolerant physical volumes.   All the physical volumes will be combined in one volume group.    A single ZFS file system will be built on that volume group.   


That's enough new stuff that I want to practice on spare drives first.   The functions we need to know how to do are:

  1.   construct a physical volume RAID1 pair
  2.   fail one drive, remove it, and replace it.
  3.   create a logical volume with 1 physical volume. 
  4.   Build an ZFS on it.   fill it with test data.
  5.   add another physical volume to the logical volume.
  6.   Grow the ZFS
We have ten test drives.   128 GB or larger.  Use all ten for the test.   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 QUESTION [on Facebook]:  What did people do before Arduinos?  I assume projects were trial and error. Or others built their own microcontrollers.  BACKGROUND: -I'm an absolute beginner to Arduino but not a total newbie to hobby electronics . -In my younger days I remember having a large bread board plugged in the wall and I put in my different components. My projects worked or didn't.  -I assume Arduino is able to test projects and preprogrammed to control projects. My answer got some likes.   Arduino raised the bar on integrated development environments for low end single chip microcomputers. It's platform agnostic and still manages to deliver a working tool chain. Install software package, launch and go. No fiddling around with jtag or prom burners or writing your own loader any more. No more paying the chip vendor $Ks for his proprietary tool chain. Made the tech way more accessible. "What did people do before?" In 1979 and 80 I built a "system" arou
Read more

Software product web sites suck.

 Pet peeve.   The front page of a software product's web site should tell you what the product is and does.   There should be links about how to get it, and an online version of the manual.   And a link to a current status page. Not a blog about developer gossip or release schedules.   Not how wonderful it will make you feel.   Not how it's better than that other thing, unless that crappy other thing is its whole reason to exist.    I think the thing at this web site might be a software distribution capable of installing a full featured desktop operating system on PC hardware, like FreeBSD or Debian.   Or it might be a hosted virtual-desktop-in-the-cloud service.   Or both and they're synchronized, that would be really cool.   It would be the community owned and directed version of Chromebook.   They went partway there with  the phrase "using a stable Ubuntu long-term release as its core" but does that mean anything to you?  What the fuck *is* this thing?    And W
Read more