[ale] Needing to cut up server disk space

[Jim Kinney]

Software raid performance hit is tiny if you have decent CPU and chipset.
The only benefit hardware raid has is battery backed write back cache.

That said, Dell built the box around that Perc chip. The toolchain for
Linux that controls those perc cards are quite usefull.

LVM is the obvious choice for maximizing partition flexibility. Don't make
all the physical space available at the beginning. It's easier to add to a
partition than to shrink one first.

Filesystem choice is almost a religion. EXT4 is basic and flexible. Btrfs
is the new darling. Zfs is hailed as the next best thing to clean air. XFS
is great but can't be resized smaller.
On Sep 23, 2015 11:44 PM, "Jeff Hubbs" <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

> I am about to get "regifted" a Dell server at work which I am told will
> have five 400GB SAS drives. I plan to turn this into a Gentoo Linux server
> into which lab staff will shell to do whatever, and I expect I may have a
> PostgreSQL instance running there as well.
>
> I'd like some suggestions as to the most admin-friendly way to deal with
> the five drives given that:
>
>    - I really dislike hardware RAID cards like Dell PERC. If there has to
>    be one, I would much rather set it to JBOD mode and get my RAIDing done
>    some other way.
>    - I foresee I will have gnashing of teeth if I set in stone at install
>    time the sizes of the /var and /home volumes. There's no telling how much
>    or how little space PostgreSQL might need in the future and you know how
>    GRAs are - give them disk space and they'll take disk space. :)
>
> I can go kernel raid, I can go LVM if I have to, I can go btrfs if I want
> to - or, you can talk me out of my PERC hate. I know that at 5x400GB I
> could RAID5 that stack easily in hardware and then use LVM or btrfs from
> there, but I wanted to see if anyone had a suggestion as to how to proceed
> starting from JBOD that would be about as easy to live with.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20150924/08c2b72b/attachment.html>