Storage Perfection

Your data is precious, so let Jonni Bidwell help you stash that digital cache quickly and safely.

- Jonni Bidwell

The storage unit rental business is booming because people love to hoard things. Family heirlooms, random eBay purchases, quaint curios from happier times, 252 issues of Linux Format – sooner or later these things can no longer be contained in our attics and our cupboards under the stairs. It’s the same with digital storage: unsorted high resolution photos and movies very rapidly fill up our hard drives, and we have to invest in more storage. Whether you want to set up your own bespoke NAS box, or just add a couple of sizeable hard drives into your tower, Linux has you covered. Through the magic of RAID, LVM, mdadm and other acronyms and abbreviations you can create fast, flexible, resilient storage for your precious bits. Data isn’t indelible – just as paper yellows and turns mildewy, so bits can be flipped (a phenomenon known as bitrot), slowly, silently corrupting your files. Fortunately, next generation filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS have built in checksumming that can automatically correct for this, and layers can easily be added for other filesystems if you need them.

Building your own NAS and setting up everything by hand, perhaps by starting with a clean Debian install, is one option. It’s a great way to learn how all the pieces fit together, and tune everything exactly how you need. You can build anything from a Pi connected to a couple of USB hard drives, to a case with half a dozen 10TB drives backed with a couple of lightning-fast SSDs for cache. Another option is to go with one of the many Linux/BSD NAS distros, which enable you to set everything up using a friendly web GUI. We’ll look at the awesome OpenMediaVault, which makes it a breeze to set up even complicated storage configurations. It’s ideal for storing and streaming media.

Spinning your disk strategies