[SOLVED] How to setup RAID6 with 8-10 3TB disks?

Sep 13, 2019
4
0
10
I have now a Linux server that is mainly used as a Samba file server, but I do other Linux stuff on that too. It uses JBOD with 3x3TB disks + the OS disk. The motherboard etc. are just very basic and outdated, it has 4GB of DDR2 memory (2x2GB @1067 MHz) and it's running an Intel Q9400 @2.66GHz.

I would like to setup a server for the similar purpose with ideally RAID6. I was wondering how I could achieve that with the most sensible configuration. I'd like to have space at least for the current data (9TB), but would like to able to extend it as far as something like 20TB. I would also like to be able to use my old disks somehow as they are not very old and hence very usable still. What kind of a motherboard should I get? And what disk drives should I get, more of those 3TB ones or something else? Do I need a RAID controller card?
 
Solution
How many disks it can have at max? Sounds reasonable!

It has 12 3.5" bays in it. 2 are for the OS in raid 1 and the other 10 have 3TB with raid 6 on it, roughly gives me 21TB of space. Its only data storage so i use Seagate Constellation ES 3 TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s from amazon at $55 each.
Sep 13, 2019
4
0
10
Just purchase a home use Synology NAS. https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS1819+#features This will do RAID 6 and will be far easier to setup and maintain that building your own.

And this I would then need to mount to my Linux server to use it as disk space for my data while running my other stuff on the server? Is there any overhead in doing that? Not experienced with NAS solutions... Otherwise seems reasonable I guess!
 
You can just attach this to your router/switch and all your devices can have access to the data. A NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and will work as its own file server. One thing to remember is that when you use RAID, all the disks in that RAID group should be the same size. If the disks are of different sizes, say 2x4TB & 2x3TB, then the array would be 4x3TB and the extra 1TB of space on the 4TB drives goes to waste. If you want 20TB of total storage in a RAID 6 then you will need 8x6TB disks with the array being 6x6TB and 2 hot spare disks.
 
Sep 13, 2019
4
0
10
You can just attach this to your router/switch and all your devices can have access to the data. A NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and will work as its own file server. One thing to remember is that when you use RAID, all the disks in that RAID group should be the same size. If the disks are of different sizes, say 2x4TB & 2x3TB, then the array would be 4x3TB and the extra 1TB of space on the 4TB drives goes to waste. If you want 20TB of total storage in a RAID 6 then you will need 8x6TB disks with the array being 6x6TB and 2 hot spare disks.

Yeah, but I have the server in a different network than my computers, so it needs to be accessible from everywhere. So I'll anyways need a server for VPN where my server is, why I thought I'd want to mount it instead of using it straight away in the network. Yeah, I was thinking of using 3TB disks, maybe then 8x3TB which would get me to 18TB or 9x3TB to get 21TB.
 
Yeah, but I have the server in a different network than my computers, so it needs to be accessible from everywhere. So I'll anyways need a server for VPN where my server is, why I thought I'd want to mount it instead of using it straight away in the network. Yeah, I was thinking of using 3TB disks, maybe then 8x3TB which would get me to 18TB or 9x3TB to get 21TB.
You can always use firewall rules to allow things in one network access to another network and restrict it to the ports required for file server use.