I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I’m planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively.

I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn’t lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I’m not sure how to do that, and I’m kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.

  • n2burns@lemmy.ca
    0·
    8 months ago

    You’re right, hardware RAID still has some use for businesses, but it’s generally a bad idea for consumers. The main reason is the procedure if the RAID controller fails. In commercial applications they have spare, compatible controllers, so a quick hardware swap and you’re back up and running, you don’t even need to rebuild the array. However, consumers generally don’t have a spare controller, and if they don’t, they can’t just get any controller, they need a compatible one or the array is lost. If a system running a software RAID has a hardware failure, the array can be moved to a new host and mdadm can rebuild the array without needing specific hardware.

      • n2burns@lemmy.ca
        0·
        8 months ago

        Yes, but they’re using it in a consumer setting. That was the whole point of my comment. It sounds like they may have 2 identical RAID controllers, which means they might have a spare. However, if one dies, they’d be looking at obtaining another spare, migrating their data to a new setup, or risking complete data loss.

        • mark3748@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          8 months ago

          They’ll have to get a new SAS controller unless the RAID controller has an HBA mode. Running ZFS under a RAID controller is the best way to lose all of your data.

          ZFS is wonderful but it takes quite a bit of planning and specialized knowledge to implement properly. Your fear of a failed RAID controller is a bit much, too. I’ve had to deal with a single controller failure in 30 years of IT (and I’ve done warranty work for all of the major OEMs in corporate IT for most of those 30 years)