Amahi Drive planning

mgfernandes
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Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:50 am

Amahi Drive planning

Postby mgfernandes » Sun Jan 15, 2012 6:11 am

Hello all,

I am new to Amahi and I am currently planning a 1st installation. I am writing to get some feedback if this disk configuration is appropriate for greyhole (never used it before and still a bit confused about it) and for my purposes.

I am building the server for 2 purposes: first to centralize the storage of my media and document files and serve it to my home devices;
second backup important data.
Due to money restrictions I will start with a 1TB drive but planning to expand it.
I will also install XBMC to watch the media content on my TV since the server will be headless and configurable from my laptop.

1TB disk:
8GB swap
42 GB "/" root
50 GB "/home" -> keep program configurations, xbmc databases and other stuff in case of upgrading OS
LVM:
100 GB "/var/had/files" -> for landing zone of greyhole
400 GB "/media" -> shares of media and documents
400 GB "/media/backup" -> backup space

Thanks in advance for suggestios or feedback
Cheers,
Miguel

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radioz
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Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby radioz » Sun Jan 15, 2012 9:14 am

If you are going to be using greyhole to manage your drive, I don't see the advantage with using LVM.
LVM is useful if you have multiple drives that you want to be managed as a 'single' drive.
I think you should choose one or the other, not both.

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moredruid
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Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby moredruid » Mon Jan 16, 2012 1:01 am

I agree. If you understand the concept of LVM, you gain lots of flexibility and the option to configure everything exactly the way you want. Greyhole makes disk management transparent to users (IMO at the expense of flexibility/configurability).

Personally I use LVM and I have Greyhole disabled. Most people here use Greyhole. It can have some issues but if you have an issue that's not already solved in the forums you get a very quick reply from the maintainer(s). As for LVM... you're kind of on your own. There is no default "best setup" since everyones wishes and requirements are different.
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mgfernandes
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Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:50 am

Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby mgfernandes » Mon Jan 16, 2012 2:04 am

Hello,

Thanks for the comments on LVM. I see that is redundant. At this time my focus is not really on LVM, for now i choose Greyhole. Therefore a configuration without LVM would be:

8GB swap
42 GB "/" root
50 GB "/home" -> keep program configurations, xbmc databases and other stuff in case of upgrading OS
400 GB "/media/backup" -> backup space
Greyhole:
100 GB "/var/had/files" -> for landing zone of greyhole
400 GB "/media" -> shares of media and documents

My questions are if the media folder will be shared to all devices of the home network, what kind of management I will be able to do with greyhole and try to eliminate some mistakes before installing OS and then re-install it just because it is not how i wanted.

Cheers,
Miguel

hemminger
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Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2011 10:16 am

Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby hemminger » Fri Jan 20, 2012 12:33 pm

amahi shares and does everything out of the /var/hda/files directory so it should look more like this:

8GB swap
42 GB "/" root
50 GB "/home" -> keep program configurations, xbmc databases and other stuff in case of upgrading OS
400 GB "/var/hda/files/media/backup" -> backup space
Greyhole:
100 GB "/var/had/files" -> for landing zone of greyhole
400 GB "/var/hda/files/media" -> shares of media and documents

Something like this. I'm not positive on the path for the media files since my server has been down for a couple of months and I'm waiting on new hardware to rebuild it, so I can't verify. But it should be along those kinds of lines if your looking to create seperate partitions for everything.

If you want simplicity I'd just do a layout like this:
8GB swap
100GB / -> root and home folders will be in here.
100GB /var/hda/files ->for landing zone
800GB /var/hda/files/media -> for data
Then if you add more drives you make them part of the /var/hda/files/media pool with greyhole and it'll balance data across all drives. If you want to limit backups directory then set a quota. This will allow you to adjust the quota later with ease if you decide you want more backup space.

Hopefully one of the admins can correct me if my setup is off. I can't remember at the moment if apps install to /var/hda/files or /var/hda/files/media. If it's var/hda/files your going to want to increase the size for landing zone and apps installation.

andybundy
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Joined: Mon Jan 05, 2009 4:25 am

Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby andybundy » Sat Jan 21, 2012 4:57 am

Hello

I'm somewhat new to Amahi, but have been working with *ix and *is platforms for some years.

You might want to considering a separate, smaller, drive for your root and other OS partitions. Separation of OS from data is always a good idea, both for safety during installations and upgrades, but also for performance reasons. I appreciate drives are not cheap at the moment, but with the push to ever larger drives, there are bargains to be had around the 120-320gb size drives that nobody wants anymore.

Another question to consider - how much RAM do you have in your system? Swap space was always important in the 'bad old days' where you could never get enough RAM, however nowadays, with systems of 2-4GB and above of RAM, it would rarely be used at all. I used to see recommendations of 1xavailable RAM or even 1.5x available RAM - but not any more.

Anyone else have thoughts on swap?

mgfernandes
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jan 15, 2012 5:50 am

Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby mgfernandes » Sat Jan 21, 2012 5:12 am

Hello,

Thks for the feedback.
Regarding the swap space, i'm going with 4GB RAM at the moment so probably 8GB is exaggerated and probably going with 4GB is more than enough.
I also like to separate the root partition and the data partition, for the upgrades and any problems i might have.
So following your suggestions i'll probably go with the following layout:
4GB swap
40GB root
56GB home
100GB /var/hda/files -> LZ
800GB /var/hda/files/media -> with the backups on this partition.

I'll try to setup a VM to try this configuration.
Cheers,
Miguel

hemminger
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Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2011 10:16 am

Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby hemminger » Sat Jan 21, 2012 12:37 pm

Anyone else have thoughts on swap?
The only other concern I've seen for swap is more on a user work station when if you ever want to do a hibernate you need a swap space equal to the size of ram for the ram to copy to the swap space. The nice part about that is then you don't have to worry about the root partition being full and you can still use Hibernation features on laptops ect... but how many people and how often is hibernation really used...

DanG
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Joined: Thu May 09, 2013 8:57 am

Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby DanG » Thu May 09, 2013 9:02 am

I actually haven't used Amahi yet, but have been heavily researching it to replace my current home built NAS.

Isn't using Greyhole on a single physical drive kind of pointless? I was under the impression that the primary purpose of Greyhole was to provide a non-raid solution for redundancy across multiple (similar or dissimilar) drives. If you use Greyhole on multiple partitions on a single drive, what does it do for you? It would do nothing for saving your data in case of a HDD failure.

Or am I off base here?

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bigfoot65
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Re: Amahi Drive planning

Postby bigfoot65 » Thu May 09, 2013 10:07 am

You are correct, Greyhole does nothing when using a single drive. It can be disabled if not used.
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