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.
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.
but this guy is specifically not using consumer hardware
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.
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)
Is HBA mode that rare? It seems pretty common. Either way, we don’t know OP’s hardware.
And I’m not scared of RAID controller failure, I’m scared of single point failure. I know it’s highly unlikely, but the risk for stranded data is unacceptable IMHO unless you’re recommending OP make sure they have a spare on hand.
Also, I never even mentioned ZFS (I’ve actually never even used it).