[kwlug-disc] Adding storage to a rack mount server

[Paul Nijjar]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 03:20:42PM -0400, Colin Mackay wrote:
> 
> All I use the drives for are MythTV recordings and general storage of
> pictures and documents.  Current usage is 1.1TB or 638GB without Myth
> recordings. :)

What do you use the server for? Is it just for storage, or is there a
fair amount of computation as well?

> 
> My options seem to be:
> 
> 1. buying 2x 2.5" 2TB SATA drives
>   - About $250
>   - Probably most reliable option
> 
> 2. Using my current two drives in a USB RAID1 device
>   - Cheaper, but...
>     - No idea which one to use, there are dozens of them.
>     - Not sure how I'd know if a drive failed
> 
> 
> I planned to use ESX on this server, so if I did go with USB option, not
> certain of the reliability of mounting USB drives on a guest OS.
> 
> 
> Any thoughts, or suggestions out there?  Something I haven't thought of?

What comes to mind is using a cheap QNAP RAID1 device. (There are
other manufacturers too, but in the application I saw the IT people
went with QNAP.) They seemed to have fairly reliable software updates,
and they appear to run Linux under the hood. 

You could use this as a relatively low-power storage device, and then
use some network mounting protocol (NFS, iSCSI, etc) to mount the
storage to your server.

- Paul