I will have a 2 x 320GB RAID 1 array in my new mythtv box that will be used solely for storing my MP3 and movies.

The drives will be hanging off an old promise raid controller. What do you guys recommend i use for the file system on these disks?

thanks

WIll you be using LVM at all? If so, I'd suggest Ext3 as you can resize the volume, else XFS.

nope no LVM, the raid controller will take care of all things raid. It will just appear as a single 320GB disk to the OS

will look into XFS - Thanks Cecil

Careful, you may not get the expected results from your Promise card - See http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html (Google for "Linux fakeraid" will turn up many others)

Thanks for the heads up. The card I will be using is a PATA Raid controller, they aren't SATA drives. I think its a Promise Fasttrack 100 Raid controller.

I had a quick look at that link but it doesnt mention the card i have. I will look into it more.. thanks

found some good info here
http://www.redaht.com/archives/ataraid- ... 00002.html

Obviously i had it all wrong thinking i would just ocnfigure the RAID set in the promise controller bios, and linux would see it as a single disk!

*sigh*... i have much to learn

That's fairly dated material, there may be newer firmware/drivers that will allow you to do hardware RAID (although I must admit I doubt it with the Promise cards).

Take a look into LVM ( http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LvmHowTo should get you going, if you're really a night owl take a peek at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO paying attention to the LVM2 particulars) . The disadvantage to LVM is that if 1 of your drives goes down you will lose the data on all. I have been running LVM for the past few years on various Linux systems and have been burned by that once before - Be sure you have a good backup routine in place!

Of course if you really want to do RAID you could pop for one of the 3Ware controllers, but I'm not sure they have any PATA offerings...

I want to run RAID1 - Mirrored Disks. LVM doesnt appeal to me, I don't need the drive space, I need data security.

I have a large MP3 collection and I would hate to lose it. It has taken years to put together!

Perhaps I should just use the promise card as an IDE controller and use something under linux to backup from one disk to the other?

Or another option would be to just use a single 320GB disk in the myth box, put the other in my desktop machine, and then synchronise between the two. This would be a fair bit more hassle though, but more secure

Rsync will accomplish this nicely. I have it in a bash script that executes via cron every morning.

_________________
Mike
My Hardware Profile

just found this - good info on setting up software raid.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

The only problem with backing up to my desktop machine is that i dont leave my desktop machine running 24/7. I guess i could actually do the backup from the desktop end using a windows backup app, and just set it to run each time i start the windows machine up

thanks for the help guys

Where is your mp3 collection now? For example, all my CD rips are on a (cough, cough) Windoze system, as I had found a piece of software that my whole family could use and be comfortable with. I continue to use it and simply copy the rips over to my Myth music directory. Instant "backup".

As Mike mentioned, rsync is a great tool for syncing files from one place to another. I use rsync to backup all my media (music, videos, pictures) to another Linux system on my network every night - Works a treat.

There is software RAID as you mentioned, I have not used it so I can't comment on it. Myself, I use SCSI drives/RAID controllers in the systems I absolutely can't lose data on, and have had no problems. Of course, this proves to be much more expensive, so I built another system to rsync all my Myth media to...

my mp3 collection currently lives on my windows desktop machine which has a RAID1 setup.

This annoys the crap out of me though, because every time i want to listen to my tunes on my frontends (xbox's) i have to turn the windows box on.

I want to move all my music to the myth box as its on 24/7. I havnt done this on my current myth box though as it only has one single 320GB disk and I dont trust single drives...

Heh, at 7200 RPM (and faster), I don't trust any drives

You already have your collection on another computer. Let me ask this - Wouldn't you feel better if your collection was on multiple systems? I have seen (very rarely) where a power supply failure took out everything in the system - Drives, motherboard, CPU, etc. Your RAID1 setup wouldn't survive something like that. If you have your data on multiple systems you can survive a catastrophic failure on any single system, then copy your data over to the rebuilt box. I personally would copy the mp3s over to the KM box and keep both copies, and whenever you add to the collection on either system copy them over to the other. If you want to automate this I believe there is an rsync port for Windoze.

Don't even get me going on removeable media/offsite backups...

well thats another option again I have a spare 3 1/2" USB2 enclosure, i could stick one of the 320GB disks in that.

I will have a think about this and let you guys know what i come up with.

Thanks for all the ideas, you have really got me thinking about the best way to do this.

cheers!