In my last post regarding using a HTPC and fileserver for home entertainment, I was referring to Ubuntu Server Edition to use as operating system for the fileserver. Till that moment it seemed reasonable because a server edition was the best choice for a server.
However during installation a couple of annoyances came across. For example it does not come with a desktop environment. Since I am used to work on a desktop most of the time and do text based commands on a terminal window, I wanted some graphical eye candy in front of me. And because I normally rely heavily on the web to find out about problems, Firefox had to be available all the time.
So I decided to start using Ubuntu Desktop Edition. The main difference between these editions is that the server is dedicated for communication over the network and its kernel is configured most optimally for server tasks. The desktop edition is best configured for having users working on it all the time. Maybe later on I will change to Server Edition back, but for now I am happily using the desktop.
My fist hurdle after installation was to configure software RAID-5, because I wanted reliable file storage. A RAID is an array of disks which is configured to operate as one disk. Depending on chosen scheme the choice can be made between reliability, storage capacity or disk speed. RAID-5 is combining most of this by providing secure data storage (one disk can break and be replaced without losing data), improving read write speed and minimum storage capacity loss.
For this purpose I bought four 1.5TB disks and one 320GB disk. On the smaller disk I installed the operating system, so the storage would be on dedicated disks. This is reliable because if the disk containing the OS fails, the array is still intact. If the array fails, the operating system can recreate the array. One back draw of RAID-5 is that always one disk is redundant, so my total storage will be 4.5TB, or in real GiB it will be around 4000GiB.
First I tried to create the array using Palimpsest Disk Utility but this was giving me more headache than help. It was running the array when I wanted it to stop and vice versa for example. So I was looking for a good solution and came across mdadm, which is an administrator program for multiple devices.
Mdadm is controlled via the terminal or via a configuration file. After some studying I decided to create a nice config file and it ran without a problem. Now I have the nice task to copy and sort all documents and music files gathered in the past years.
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