Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

dsgibson
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Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby dsgibson » Sun Nov 19, 2017 12:42 pm

Hi. I just installed Fedora 25/Amahi 10 and turned on Greyhole. All is working fine except I don't think I've created my partitions optimally for Greyhole and would appreciate advice on that. My primary drive (nvme0n1) is a 500 GB SSD and my second drive (sda) is a 2 TB HDD partitioned as shown below. (Both drives were new when I partitioned them and I have 16GB RAM.) I would like to use Greyhole to pool the large amount of free space on the primary SSD drive with the second HDD drive. However, during the installation, I only created a root, swap, and two boot partitions on my primary drive. I deleted the suggested \home partition creation thinking I was following an installation instructions recommendation. I added my full single-partition second drive to the Greyhole storage pool, but balked at adding my root partition, with all the free space on my primary drive, because the HDA Drive Pooling screen specifically warns against that. And I did have a problem with my root partition filling up on a prior installation.

Should I add an additional partition on my primary drive to pool with my second drive? If so, what's a safe size to leave for my root partition? Or am I completely missing something here? I'll appreciate any suggestions.

Dave

[david@hda /]$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 1.8T 0 part /var/hda/files/drives/drive1
nvme0n1 259:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 447G 0 part /
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 200M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p4 259:4 0 16G 0 part [SWAP]
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 1G 0 part /boot

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bigfoot65
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby bigfoot65 » Sun Nov 19, 2017 6:50 pm

Did you follow the installation instructions precisely for Fedora 25? If so, there would have been no /home partition created.

We recommend folks not use LVM, which is how the /home partition is created.

Ideally, it would be best if you started over. If you cannot, recommend you add all remaining free space on the OS drive to the root (/) partition. Since that is your landing zone for Greyhole, it would be the best solution.
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dsgibson
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby dsgibson » Sun Nov 19, 2017 7:16 pm

Did you follow the installation instructions precisely for Fedora 25? If so, there would have been no /home partition created.

We recommend folks not use LVM, which is how the /home partition is created.

Ideally, it would be best if you started over. If you cannot, recommend you add all remaining free space on the OS drive to the root (/) partition. Since that is your landing zone for Greyhole, it would be the best solution.

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes I followed those instructions precisely. No /home partition was created. I selected Standard not LVM as instructed. So "all remaining free space on the OS drive" (my SSD) *is* in the root (/) partition. I understand that's great as far as the landing zone goes - it's huge. However, I want Greyhole to duplicate my pooled shares across two physical drives, my HHD (all 2TB free) and what's not needed for the OS on my SSD. How do I tell Greyhole to pool most of my SSD space with my HHD, without including the root partition in my Greyhole pool, which the instructions say not to do? I think I'm misunderstanding something in the instructions, but I'm not sure what. If I were to restart from scratch, which I don't think should be necessary, how should I partition my SSD OS drive differently?

Dave

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bigfoot65
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby bigfoot65 » Mon Nov 20, 2017 12:29 pm

If I were to restart from scratch, which I don't think should be necessary, how should I partition my SSD OS drive differently?
Your OS drive is not very big, so the extra space you have available is needed for the LZ.

Don't recommend using the OS drive for the storage pool. Otherwise, if the root drive get's full your HDA will crash.

How much free space is left in the root partition? If it's not 500GB or more, you're best not trying to use it in the storage pool. Greyhole works best with drives without an OS, purely dedicated for files.

There are tools you can use to resize the root partition, but we don't provide that level of support. You would have to do it on your own. Personally I would recommend you get a second hard drive and use it instead. Storage is cheap.
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dsgibson
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby dsgibson » Mon Nov 20, 2017 7:17 pm

Your OS drive is not very big, so the extra space you have available is needed for the LZ.

Don't recommend using the OS drive for the storage pool. Otherwise, if the root drive get's full your HDA will crash.

How much free space is left in the root partition? If it's not 500GB or more, you're best not trying to use it in the storage pool. Greyhole works best with drives without an OS, purely dedicated for files.

There are tools you can use to resize the root partition, but we don't provide that level of support. You would have to do it on your own. Personally I would recommend you get a second hard drive and use it instead. Storage is cheap.
Thanks for the additional response. My OS drive is 500 GB. Is that no longer considered big?? It looks like I have about 445 GB free in my root partion, although some of that will be needed for the landing zone. I'd rather not have most of that 445 GB go to waste. My NUC only holds two iternal drives and I'd prefer not to connect a permanent external drive if it's not necessary. Wouldn't creating an additional partition on my OS drive for the storage pool protect the OS if that partition fills up? I'd still have plenty of room in the landing zone on the root partition. If it's really a bad idea to have a storage pool partition on my OS drive, then I don't really see a benefit of using Greyhole on my system as I should have no problem fitting all of my data on my 2TB secondary drive, just not replicated. I don't think I'll have any trouble repartitioning if an additional partition for the storage pool on my OS drive will safely allow me to use part of it for the storage pool.

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bigfoot65
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby bigfoot65 » Tue Nov 21, 2017 7:37 am

Wouldn't creating an additional partition on my OS drive for the storage pool protect the OS if that partition fills up?
Yes and no. If you shrink the root partition down, then make a new partition to use for Greyhole it will work. However, you need to ensure you have a large enough LZ to support your files.

Greyhole really only works well with additional drives. You can make it work, but we don't recommend it.
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dsgibson
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby dsgibson » Tue Nov 21, 2017 4:17 pm

Greyhole really only works well with additional drives. You can make it work, but we don't recommend it.
Thanks again. I'm curious what the issues are with Greyhole managing a storage pool in a partition on my primary drive. Perhaps I'll find out.

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bigfoot65
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby bigfoot65 » Tue Nov 21, 2017 5:08 pm

The issues you may encounter is the root partition could fill up. If you have a separate partition on the OS drive for Greyhole, it will be small.

It will work, but you will potentially have the same file twice on one physical drive. Most prefer to use a separate physical drive for Greyhole due to the limited size available on the OS drive.
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dsgibson
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby dsgibson » Tue Nov 21, 2017 8:57 pm

The issues you may encounter is the root partition could fill up. If you have a separate partition on the OS drive for Greyhole, it will be small.

It will work, but you will potentially have the same file twice on one physical drive. Most prefer to use a separate physical drive for Greyhole due to the limited size available on the OS drive.
Got it. I guess I'm old school, but I don't consider a 500GB OS drive small. :-) I plan to duplicate files so I hope I'll have one copy on the OS drive partition and one on my secondary drive. I can see the advantage of having a second and third drive of similar size, and I can do that with an external drive. But again, I hate wasting 400+ GB on my primary super fast SSD drive.

Thanks again.

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bigfoot65
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Re: Setting Partitions to Support Greyhole

Postby bigfoot65 » Wed Nov 22, 2017 7:20 am

But again, I hate wasting 400+ GB on my primary super fast SSD drive.
You are not going to notice a drastic speed increase with the SSD. The most advantage of a SSD is booting the machine. Not a huge speed boost with transferring files.

Keep in mind that part of that 400GB is your LZ, which I recommend you have about 200GB to handle all our shares. By default, all shares are located on the root partition, so they will take up space as well. Especially for files/folders that are not managed by Greyhole.
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