JBOD reliability

[Pu-239]

Is there anything that allows something like a JBOD (multiple discs all on one partition), that won't kill the entire filesystem upon failure of one disk that's suitable to run w/o expensive hardware? Solaris has RAID-Z, but I'm not sure if solaris express is suitable for home usage given the lack of patches, and Linux has software RAID5, but I don't think you can arbitrarily add hard drives to a proper RAID setup...

Then again, RAID is not a backup solution. How does one actually back up gigs upon gigs of stuff w/o burning tens of DVD's? Multiple external hard drives seem clunky for a home fileserver.

[phongn]

You could try eBaying tape drives or having external HD enclosures that you can take with out (with data backed up to it). Unfortunately, RAID-Z or RAID 5 are about your only options for software, and as you noted, they can be pretty slow unaccelerated.

[Howedar]

Tape drives are still the one true backup solution, as far as I'm aware.

[Uraniun235]

and Linux has software RAID5, but I don't think you can arbitrarily add hard drives to a proper RAID setup...

There's a way to do it but I think it's one of those "this could easily fuck up everything if something goes wrong" procedures.

Why do you need a huge partition spanned across a bunch of drives?

[phongn]

I think LVM will let you add drives in Linux.

[Pu-239]

and Linux has software RAID5, but I don't think you can arbitrarily add hard drives to a proper RAID setup...

There's a way to do it but I think it's one of those "this could easily fuck up everything if something goes wrong" procedures.

Why do you need a huge partition spanned across a bunch of drives?

Eh, just convenience really... hrm, looks like RAID5+LVM looks like the best solution, that is, if I didn't care about performance (does it even matter if the bottleneck is 100Mbps ethernet anyway?). Anyway, this is just theoretical, since I'm not even using up my fileserver's 320GB yet, and 400-500GB drives are falling in price rapidly...