Linux Format forums

Re: The hard drives are running out of space!!!

nelz — Thu Jun 16, 2011 12:56 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2011 12:56 pm

RAID1 gives less space than RAID5! If S is the size of the smallest disk and N is the number of disks, RAID one always has size S whereas RAID5 has a size of (N-1)*S.

Re: The hard drives are running out of space!!!

Dutch_Master — Thu Jun 16, 2011 11:57 am

Author: Dutch_Master

Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2011 11:57 am

Investigate LVM and reconfiguring RAID5 arrays as RAID1, thus freeing diskspace. You'll need a separate 2TB disk to mirror the 2TB RAID5 array, then remove the array and replace with another 2TB disk. Benefit of the latter is that with newer drives you increase the lifespan of the (new) array, as well as actually offering more diskspace...

The hard drives are running out of space!!!

bobthebob1234 — Thu Jun 16, 2011 10:28 am

Author: bobthebob1234

Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2011 10:28 am

So at the moment where I work / used to go to school, we have (as far as I can find) 4 different nasses each with different hard drives, raid levels, etc and they are all very close to running out of storage (even the 2tb raid 5 one!)

Basically what I have been thinking (but have no idea about how to implement) is this:

where the lots of hard drives (obviously actually in computers...) are on their own little private network (gigabit) and if /when we require more storage we just bung more hard drives in private network.

Then though some magic the front facing server makes the rest of the network think there is just one mahousive hard drive. It would also be nice if the front facing server could do authentication with MS active directory...

Does anyone know if this is possible and how one would go about doing this.

Thanks

I have found http://www.gluster.org/ . Is this the sort of thing I need to be looking at? The about page sounds like what I want to do...