Anything like Drive Extender

[Corey Lamb]

Long story short I was a 0.7 user along time ago & have since moved on to WHS due to SageTV running on it. Well with google buying SageTV I have Migrated to XBMC & basically just need my server to host the files.

This being said I would also like some sort of duplication & I don't want to have to replace my current drives with consist of 1x 1TB, 2x 1.5TB & 3x 2TB all 5400 RPM Samsung drives. Currently I have about 4TB of data used so with a 1:1 duplication I would already be at 80% full so I would prefer something like DE where I can pick & choose the duplication on a per folder or directory level.

Is there any way of doing this in freenas for someone who is not so linux smart?

 

[survive]

Hi Corey,

I'm not quite sure what you are asking here.

If you are looking for deduplication, that's not in FreeNAS yet as that's a feature of ZFSv28.

If you are asking about the non-RAID data protection schemes where specified data is copied to a second disk I don't think FreeNAS has anything that will do that either.

The good news is that you could simply pick up a 4th 2TB drive and use FreeNAS to create a 4 disk raidz volume which would get you about 6TB drive space with redundancy for all your data. The best part is you could do this by moving your existing 4TB to the other 3 drives and when you are done those 3 drives would be free to be used in something else.

-Will

 

[Atamido]

Drive Extender is like RAID1, but using file level duplication at the file system level. The benefits are:

1. Drives don't need to be the same size.
2. You can take a single drive out of the array and recover all files stored on it by just by connecting the drive to another system
3. The array can be expanded by just attaching another drive.

What Corey wants is Greyhole, a *nix implementation of Microsoft Drive Extender.
http://www.greyhole.net/

Greyhole has the added benefits of:
1. It is file system agnostic, so you can have independent drives formatted with ZFS, EXT4, etc in a single array.
2. You can include network locations in an array. This allows you to use other computers on your LAN or on the Internet as part of your array
3. Allows more than 2 copies of a file, so particularly important files (family photos?) could be stored 3+ times
4. Can create complex rules about what should be stored where. So, all .jpg files should have a copy on the server, on another computer on the LAN, and one on the Internet.

The downsides to Greyhole/Drive Extender are that:
1. As with RAID1, the storage requirements are a 2:1 scale, instead of scaling space better with more drives like RAID5/z.
2. There are no I/O benefits for reading/writing large files spanning many spindles as it just writes/reads from one source at once.