What kind of raid do you want, striped, mirrored, distributed parity, or a combination of these? For a striped raid, lvm should be good enough, though I haven't yet had to replace a lvm disk, so don't know how well moving extents from one physical volume to another works in practice, especially if moving from a drive that is failing or has failed. For the other raid types, I'd suggest using mdadm to create a /dev/mdx device, put something like ext4 on that, and export with samba. I don't use /dev/mdx devices anywhere right now, but when I did use that a long time ago, I remember it handled failing/failed drives in the array nicely, without needing to rebuild the array. I imagine it has gotten better than it was over the years if anything. Greg On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 06:33:36PM -0500, Rob wrote: > At present I have about 20 tb of bare hard disk. The idea is to consolidate it all in one central location, grouped into an array of some type, be it zfs, lvm/raid, or something else. It can then be accessed by any computer/device on my network, like my phone/tablet, my laptops and my regular desktop computers. > I want the storage array to be dynamically expandable without having to rebuild everything, which i understand something like Unraid can do. I found out last night that zfs won't let you dynamically expand a raid array without replacing every drive in the pool, so that went out as an option. The hard disks are going to be in esata 4 to 8 bay enclosures. > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup -- web site: http://www.gregn.net gpg public key: http://www.gregn.net/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) If we haven't been in touch before, e-mail me before adding me to your contacts. -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@xxxxxx _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
