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I have a Sun Ultra 24 that I am using as a home server, with 2x 1TB SATA drives, and two other drives for my OS and miscellaneous files. Eventually, I will replace those with 1TB SATA disks as well. This server has 4GB of memory, expandable to 8GB.
The 1TB disks are manually mirrored now, I would possibly like to set up RAID on them. I am using the disks for backup for my music, photos, and movies (iDVD projects). I have an iMac with 500G that is the source of much of this data that I am moving to the server. I also have my Windows 7 laptop (business) and a WinXP laptop for the kids (no data, just games). I have a gigabit network setup to facilitate file transfers between the computers.
My question is this: what OS (CentOS vs Win2008), subsequent file system (ext vs NTFS), and mirroring (RAID 1 or manual) should I go with to meet my requirements? (I need a 64 bit OS to take advantage of all 4GB of memory)
Needs (in order of priority):
1 - All computers should be able to access the backup directory to put or retrieve files
2 - Ability to pull a drive out and put into an external enclosure to recover any data or move massive amounts of data
3 - RAID setup between the disks, or a good process that copies from one drive to the other. I am using CopyToSynchronizer now to copy from one to the other. I can live with a weekly copy of one 1TB disk to the other.
4 - Easy to setup/manage/maintain
5 - Easy to expose my "miscellaneous disk" through a web server or other application so that I can access the files remotely, upload files, etc
6 - Easy eventual upgrade of the two 1TB disks to 2TB disks (1-2 years)
7 - Remote access, either RDC, VNC through an SSH tunnel
8 - Proxy server on the OS
9 - Print server on the network
Supplementary information Currently, the OS is Windows Server 2003, with the drives being NTFS. I am running VMWare Workstation and two guest OS: a WinXP that is needed to run certain software on the server that is not Windows Server compatible (very light requirements on this OS), and CentOS as a linux server for FTP, SSH, HTTP
I am not very happy with the performance of Win2003, as well as the constant need to install updates. I do not run a domain controller or anything else on the Win2003 server that I could not port to CentOS. If I go with CentOS (ext2 file system) on the server, I can eliminate a VMWare guest VM and just run WinXP as a guest.
I have a legitimate license for Win2008 through my MSDN subscription.
The Sun Ultra 24 supports RAID 1 with linux, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 with Windows.
I am somewhat proficient at linux, but much more proficient with Windows, only because of experience. I do enjoy tinkering with linux, but I am looking for ease of managing.
Just a quick question: why ext2? It's very old and doesn't use journaling. ext3 has been stable and a default file system for a long time now and some distributions are starting to switch over to ext4. Is there some benefit to ext2 that does not apply to ext3 and ext4? – AndrejaKo – 2010-07-11T15:34:46.460
1I updated to indicate that I only care about ext vs NTFS. I have no preference for ext2, ext3, ext4. – RussellW – 2010-07-12T15:06:31.060