I would like to investigate switching my storage system from Windows 8.1 to Linux. Currently I have 3 snapraid configurations on my main storage system, each with 24 drives of which 3 are parity (3 HP SAS Expanders connected to an Areca ARC-1680-ix-16 controller using JBOD).
My main question is if I have to reformat the drives to a different file system, or if there is a way to keep the drives NTFS. Each of the data drives have 2 partitions - the main and then a 10G partition to ensure that the drive can't get too big for the parity drives.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
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You should definitely change the parity drives to ext4 or XFS. You can leave all the data drives NTFS, but you will have to test to see how good the performance is on linux when reading NTFS (or when writing new files to your NTFS partitions).
Last edit: Jessie Taylor 2015-03-21
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Of course, if the read performance on the data drives using NTFS is poor, and you have a spare drive, you can migrate the data disks from NTFS to ext4 or XFS one-at-a-time, and as long as you're not otherwise modifying the data on the drive being migrated, your array will still be perfectly usable during the migration.
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FWIW, when I migrated from Windows Server 2008r2 to Linux (Arch) I found the NTFS performance to be poor enough in both speed and CPU usage, that I chose to migrate my drives to ext4. It was certainly usable as NTFS drives, but I had the free space so I made the move.
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I just did this a few months ago. I Went with Lubuntu and couldn't be happier. The first and foremost question I have is are you familiar with how linux mounts drives and the operating system in general?
I would like to investigate switching my storage system from Windows 8.1 to Linux. Currently I have 3 snapraid configurations on my main storage system, each with 24 drives of which 3 are parity (3 HP SAS Expanders connected to an Areca ARC-1680-ix-16 controller using JBOD).
My main question is if I have to reformat the drives to a different file system, or if there is a way to keep the drives NTFS. Each of the data drives have 2 partitions - the main and then a 10G partition to ensure that the drive can't get too big for the parity drives.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
You should definitely change the parity drives to ext4 or XFS. You can leave all the data drives NTFS, but you will have to test to see how good the performance is on linux when reading NTFS (or when writing new files to your NTFS partitions).
Last edit: Jessie Taylor 2015-03-21
Of course, if the read performance on the data drives using NTFS is poor, and you have a spare drive, you can migrate the data disks from NTFS to ext4 or XFS one-at-a-time, and as long as you're not otherwise modifying the data on the drive being migrated, your array will still be perfectly usable during the migration.
FWIW, when I migrated from Windows Server 2008r2 to Linux (Arch) I found the NTFS performance to be poor enough in both speed and CPU usage, that I chose to migrate my drives to ext4. It was certainly usable as NTFS drives, but I had the free space so I made the move.
I just did this a few months ago. I Went with Lubuntu and couldn't be happier. The first and foremost question I have is are you familiar with how linux mounts drives and the operating system in general?
There is a great tutorial for this here.
http://zackreed.me/articles/89-compile-aufs-with-3-18-6-kernel-hnotify-and-nfs-exportability
http://zackreed.me/articles/72-snapraid-on-ubuntu-12-04