Disk Array - Conclusion
What I actually got was the Calvary 8 Bay eSATA RAID enclosure. There are other, similar options that look, and probably are, identical. And similar identical ones are available even cheaper if you go looking.
What it gives you is an 8 hotswap drive bays. The drives go in sleds, which latch into place. There's one large fan in the back for cooling, which is nearly silent.
The hardware itself is actually two 4 bay raid boxes in a single enclosure. It presents two eSata ports to your computer, and if you have RAID setup, it will appear to be two drives.
However, I decided that I would be best served using Linux software RAID. They're already plugged into a Linux machine which acts as my file server. The main reason for this is:
I wanted to present a single volume to my other computers. This meant using LVM on top of the raid. And that means that I can only present the drive via a Linux machine. As such, I'm not gaining much from hardware RAID, other then administration headaches.
As an added bonus, using Linux software RAID let's me include all 8 volumes in the RAID array, which also gains me another 2TB of usable storage, as it's a single RAID 5 instance across all 8 drives, rather then two RAID 5 instances across 4 drives each. Even if I wanted the added security of being able to handle two drive failures, it would have provided high reliability then as separate arrays, either as a hot spare or as RAID 6.
So my final configuration is a single, 14TB RAID5 volume. That I have partitioned into two halves and then merged with LVM. That combined volume is then formatted Ext4.
Now, this last part does deserve some discussion. The reason for the split is that I previously had a pair of 2TB that were RAID1 mirrored. These drives are a part of the final RAID 5 configuration. In order to get their data on to the new RAID5 array, I provisioned half of the drives and copied the data over from the mirrored drives. When that completed, I reformatted those drives and added them along with 2 new drives to the RAID 5 array, bringing me up to my final 8 drive configuration. When the RAID grow completed, I added a second partition and then added that partition to LVM. And then I resized the ext4 partition.
Using LVM in this way also means that if I get additional arrays in the future, they can still be merged into the same volume, if I so choose.
What it gives you is an 8 hotswap drive bays. The drives go in sleds, which latch into place. There's one large fan in the back for cooling, which is nearly silent.
The hardware itself is actually two 4 bay raid boxes in a single enclosure. It presents two eSata ports to your computer, and if you have RAID setup, it will appear to be two drives.
However, I decided that I would be best served using Linux software RAID. They're already plugged into a Linux machine which acts as my file server. The main reason for this is:
I wanted to present a single volume to my other computers. This meant using LVM on top of the raid. And that means that I can only present the drive via a Linux machine. As such, I'm not gaining much from hardware RAID, other then administration headaches.
As an added bonus, using Linux software RAID let's me include all 8 volumes in the RAID array, which also gains me another 2TB of usable storage, as it's a single RAID 5 instance across all 8 drives, rather then two RAID 5 instances across 4 drives each. Even if I wanted the added security of being able to handle two drive failures, it would have provided high reliability then as separate arrays, either as a hot spare or as RAID 6.
So my final configuration is a single, 14TB RAID5 volume. That I have partitioned into two halves and then merged with LVM. That combined volume is then formatted Ext4.
Now, this last part does deserve some discussion. The reason for the split is that I previously had a pair of 2TB that were RAID1 mirrored. These drives are a part of the final RAID 5 configuration. In order to get their data on to the new RAID5 array, I provisioned half of the drives and copied the data over from the mirrored drives. When that completed, I reformatted those drives and added them along with 2 new drives to the RAID 5 array, bringing me up to my final 8 drive configuration. When the RAID grow completed, I added a second partition and then added that partition to LVM. And then I resized the ext4 partition.
Using LVM in this way also means that if I get additional arrays in the future, they can still be merged into the same volume, if I so choose.