Friday, February 12, 2010

Time to retire the beast

So my primary server at home for the LAN is an aging dual P3 with 1GB of memory (it won't even support any beyond that).

Currently it has the following disk layout:

/dev/mapper/DataVolGroup01-DataVol
184G 87G 88G 50% /data01
/dev/mapper/DataVolGroup00-DataVol00
880G 834G 1.5G 100% /data00

My mythtv backend (a somewhat freshly built X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+) has this disk layout:

/dev/mapper/mythvg-mythvol
978G 380G 599G 39% /myth

I finally got the new drives I ordered from Amazon back in November - 3x1TB Hitachi Deskstars.

Now the mythbackend looks like this:
/dev/mapper/mythvg-mythvol
978G 380G 599G 39% /myth
/dev/sdc1 932G 4.2M 932G 1% /myth2

The 880GB on lansrv is actually an external SATA array connected via Multilane to the server (4x500GB in a RAID10). I've been wanting to retire that box for some time as it draws WAY too much power for the service it provides. The mythbackend is becoming the hub for storing our archived records, pictures and music on the network.

However I didn't really have an easy place to dump that data on lansrv temporarily. Now I do. Here's the tentative plan:

1- Migrate all the lansrv data over to new drive on mythbackend.
2- Pull two of the 500GB drives out of the external array and put in the new 1TB drives.
3 - Mirror the new 1TB drives
4 - Rebuild the remaining 500GB drives as a mirrored pair.
5 - Stripe the two mirrors together
6 - Figure out what to do with the spare 1TB and 2 500GB drives.

Most likely the 1TB drive remaining will end up as a hot-spare for the 1TB mirror. Hitachi's aren't called Deathstars for nothing. The other two 500GB drives will probably go somewhere internal to the mythbackend box and become a mirrored pair as well and added to the new LV.

If I can manage to fit an eSATA card with 2 ports in the machine, I might consider moving all 4 500GB drives into a new array and adding it to the volume group.

Who knows? I'll figure something out but for now I had to have somewhere to dump the data temporarily while I shifted hardware and data around.

As an interesting side note, the 4 500GB drives have been running in the multilane enclosure since I worked at CLA. That's at least 5 years. I don't even remember what KIND of drive they were but I'm damn sure going to make note of it when I pull them.

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