Best quick expandable disk array solution

[Randy R]

What solutions exist to offer parity data protection while also allowing the array to be expanded easily with a new drive if I need to add new space. As it stands now with the solution I use I have to essentially know my future requirements now in order to have a regular raid array. It would be nice to just plop in a new drive at a whim. 

I am open to anything I can install on a regular server.
 

I typically run standard linux software raid over hdds or ssds with an ext4 volume on them. My main nas server uses raid6. It is a collection of 9x6TB drives and I am at the point where I want to look into a new solution.

I plan to setup a new server that is going to itself house drives as well as have direct attached drives in the future.

In order to expand a raid6 array, it has to be taken offline and extended, which takes a while. It is a scary and intensive process. It would be nice to not have to deal with that process and instead use some other method. 

 

Thanks.

 

[Kilrah]

Unraid's probably the best solution for that, but it's a whole OS.

[MG2R]

While I haven’t used it myself yet, my understanding is Ceph could offer you what you want. It does come with a whole host of other issues though, like needing a relatively large amount of compute resources and it not having raid5-like efficiency. But you can add drives at any point in time and have it auto rebalance online. 
 

Edit: if you’re ok with not going drive by drive you can go for either LVM on top of multiple arrays or an all-in-one solution with ZFS, where you can add new arrays to the pool. Of course with both of these solutions you do not get automatic rebalancing meaning that your performance will not necessarily increase when you add more droves. 

[Blue4130]

Snap raid on top of Linux.

[leadeater]

LVM RAID would be by far the easiest, or post above Snap RAID.

 

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_and_managing_logical_volumes/configuring-raid-logical-volumes_configuring-and-managing-logical-volumes

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM#RAID

 

Above docs applicable to any Linux distro

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, MG2R said:

While I haven’t used it myself yet, my understanding is Ceph could offer you what you want. It does come with a whole host of other issues though, like needing a relatively large amount of compute resources and it not having raid5-like efficiency. But you can add drives at any point in time and have it auto rebalance online. 

I would say Ceph is probably a little too complicated solution for this, Ceph-Ansible does make the deployment a lot easier but if you need NFS or SMB protocol you need to install extra gateway software etc, quite a lot of layers. Also it's not considered all that "safe" to do singe server Ceph either, you can change the deployment option to allow it since by default that is not supported but it's for lab testing only really.

 

Single server GlusterFS would probably be middle ground between LVM RAID and Ceph, less complex and better native NFS/SMB capabilities. Still not recommended for single server either.

[Randy R]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll play around with them. As I mentioned I have stuck with the tried and true standard raid options. I typically go for 1 parity drive for every 6, so 12 max drives in a raid6 array. But anyways, I might as well describe my use case. My NAS should be accessible via NFS and smb. I plan to store files you'd find on Plex, as well as general files, photos, but also large disk images and surveillance footage. I have other servers on my rack as well that would use this storage pool. Performance is nice but its not too essential, or I have an separate array/pool for performance if I need that. 

[MG2R]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

LVM RAID

Well I’ll be damned. Never heard of that. I used to run LVM on top of mdadm back in the day. I’ll have to play around with that.