Hello,

I'm going to upgrade my slackware fileserver with a SSD. Because of the limited space on the SSD, I'm thinking about mounting /home on a big HDD. I'm also considering to have the 10 users to store "all" their data in their home directory. MyDocuments, MyBackups (application- phone- etc- backups), MyVideos, MyPictures, etc. Ofcourse the MyVideos and MyPictures will increase the amount of space needed for /home with many GB's. But it will be a big enough HDD.

The HDD will be backupped locally with some scheme (not sure yet what scheme) and the backup disk will be mirrored offsite. I'm thinking about taking snapshots or images of the SSD for backups.

The question is, is this a good idea? I know that mounting /home on some other drive or partition is pretty common. And I think /home is intend to be the place where users store their data. But also for this much data? I don't see why not... I think it is great for managing data as it is now all centralised to one point. It's making it easy to backup, users can easily access their data on different computers via samba or even sftp. But is it really all great? Are there things to keep in mind with such a setup? Performance wise I don't think Linux will suffer? (btw, the HDD is probably going to be a HW RAID0. It's faster and I can expand easily).

Thanks for any advise on this!

Robbert

That's how I have my machines set up. Definitely not on a RAID 0 though, I never use RAID 0. 1, 10, 5, 6, 60, etc., but not 0.

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Why is that? Is it because you have twice the risk of loosing data? I guess RAID 10 would be wiser but also double the price. But yes, in an event of a drive failure, I would lose 1 day worth of data. Which isn't usually that much but it could...

Yes, because of the risk. With a good backup solution you'll be out a day or more to recover (depending on drive size), but I prefer to just swap out the bad drive and be on my way, rather than losing access to the computer for a day and losing everything that was added/modified since the last backup.

A 2 drive RAID 0 isn't horrible, but most of my setups use many more drives than that, so the risk of failure jumps way up.