Guest sirsmiley Posted February 12, 2008 Report Share Posted February 12, 2008 essentially i want linux to recognize a folder say /media or /storage as being just massive...i want to take a bunch of drives and make them all share space in one huge folder....would the easiest way to do this is by software raid before installing linux? these drives can be the same size but for sake of argument lets say they are not... basically i want to take a bunch of harddrives and create one massive storage folder for recorded tv shows and things...thoughts? tia Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 12, 2008 Report Share Posted February 12, 2008 What's the size of the drives? Are they all the same? You could effectively use software raid and set it up as Raid 0. Alternatively, you can use LVM instead - although I would tend to use Raid 0 and not LVM. If a drive dies though, be prepared to lose data across all drives should it happen. Therefore backups recommended should you take this route. You won't be able to use /media as this is used by the system for mounting drives, I would suggest /data or something else that doesn't already exist on the system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest sirsmiley Posted February 12, 2008 Report Share Posted February 12, 2008 a friend of mine is planning on hooking a pc up via gigabit to a shuttle pc hooked up to his HDTV...essentially he was going to buy a NAS for around 300 dollars and spend another 300 on drives taking it up to a terabyte of space (has 2 sata slots)..... i guess if he just puts 2 500 gig drives in he could use hardware raid 0 (...i believe he is thinking a cheap tower and motherboard combo maybe a low end nvidia chipset with hardware raid 0/1 ? he wouldnt be overly concerned if he lost his data it would just be tv/recorded movies and such ..... and he could play them back via the linux pc via SMB to windows media center in the shuttle (hooked up by DVI to hdtv), im trying to convince him that running linux on it would be a much better solution for streaming and managing data and backups (burning it to DVD right off the server pc ) rather than being stuck with 2 drive NAS when a pc is around the same price for barebones thanks for your help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 12, 2008 Report Share Posted February 12, 2008 Bear in mind that motherboards that supposedly have hardware raid are in fact software raid embedded on a chip. You won't get full hardware raid unless you buy an expensive raid controller. Therefore using the motherboard versus software raid is no real different. The only benefit of using raid within Linux is that it's not reliant on the BIOS RAID. If your BIOS RAID dies, then you lose everything on the disks and won't be able to recover. If you use Linux software raid, you're much safer. Raid 0 will be fast. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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