[Discuss] Home NAS redux

[Rich Pieri]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2012 13:18:15 -0500
Mark Woodward <markw at mohawksoft.com> wrote:

> I'm considering software raid 5,

Software RAID 5 and it's variants are the opposite of performance. If
you want performance with redundancy then use RAID 1+0. Better to use
ZFS or Btrfs with mirrored data and metadata. This is faster and easier
to manage than LVM2 and mdadm.


> The questions are these:
> I sort of like having a web interface to the DLINK-321, are there any 
> similar projects for Linux? FreeNAS is targeted toward freebsd and
> uses ZFS, I do not wish to use zfs for license issues.

What do you mean by "web interface"? Access to shared files systems?
Configuration? Something I missed?

FreeNAS isn't "targeted" toward FreeBSD. It is FreeBSD.

There's nothing wrong with the CDDL. It's a perfectly valid free
software license. Regardless, FreeNAS also uses UFS and has plugins for
other file systems, and it has software and fake RAID systems.


> When not in use, I'd like the system to spin down the hard disks and
> use less power.

I advise against doing this with RAIDed disks. You can run into
problems with spinup taking too long. This will fault the RAID set.


> I've used the Linux software raid in the past with mixed results.
> What is your take on the modern iteration of the code?

It's slow, clunky, and not worth the hassle. Use ZFS or Btrfs instead.

-- 
Rich P.