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On 27/12/13 15:16, Tom wrote: > On 27/12/13 13:15, Richard Brown wrote: >> Hi Guys >> >> Thanks for all the help. I bought the HP from Ebuyer and waiting for >> it to arrive. Any thoughts on distro please? Also the HP comes with a >> 250gb hd. I was going to buy a couple of 1tb as well. Put the os on >> the 250gb and then run data of the 1tb and mirror to the other 1tb. >> Any thoughts on this please? >> >> Thanks > I'd put the OS and swap on an SSD as this would give the greatest > possible performance. > Tom te tom te tom > Whilst you definitely will get better performance if the OS is based off a SSD drive rather than spinning rust, for a low usage file/backup/etc home server I doubt performance is going to be an issue unless it doubles up as a VM server or build box. I'd also avoid putting swap on a SSD as well: the constant thrashing of swap will negatively effect wear levelling and kill your drive that much faster. It's much better to just buy enough RAM in the first place (4 or preferably 8Gb as a minimum) and completely disable swap - churning memory pages to disk has no place in 2013 anyway. None of my personal machines, except my dinky laptop with 1Gb RAM, have swap anymore (16Gb, 32Gb, 64Gb and 128Gb respectively). For the same reason, I use /run/shm to house my volatile Firefox profiles (which also thrash the disk) and create temporary RAM disks to arbitrary mount points for housing compile jobs. As yet I haven't worn out a single SSD and I was an early adopter. Throw out your original idea of mirrors (I presume you were going to RAID 1 your two 1Tb disks, either in hardware if the HP supports it, or via mdraid) and install ZFS instead: I know that sounds weird, but it actually works very well on Linux now and has moved way past experimental especially if you're using a stable distro like Debian Wheezy, CentOS, etc. All the stuff you need is here: http://zfsonlinux.org/ Just build the box first and before you actually put it into production, have a good play with the ZFS stuff first to make sure you understand what you're doing and you'll never look back. You could use native BTRFS if it wasn't A: unfinished; B: unstable, and C: crap. If disk throughput is going to be a major issue, definitely install as much RAM as you can cram in there and maybe even use a SSD as the L2ARC/ZIL cache drive for the RAIDZ. If you want to go native with ZFS you could also build a vanilla FreeBSD server or just go with FreeNAS, which sounds like it will do everything you want it to anyway. But you *really* should go with ZFS, one way or the other. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq