RAID Levels, let's explain...

Nowadays we are hearing a lot about RAID and how to keep our data safe but a lot of people don't know what a RAID level means and its pro/cons so I'll try to explain it in a short and easy way.

Why Zfs is the best file system...

The universe of file systems is populated with an incredible amount of good and less-good ones but the best above all is certainly Zfs from Oracle. Maybe it isn't the fastest of the less CPU-expencive but if the most secure. Why? Everyone knows it combines a file system, a logical volume manager and two software raid levels (5 and 6, named raid-z and raid-z2) but it is the only one (as far I know) to implement a continuous data integrity verification against data corruption mode.

Let's explain with an example!

How-to: NIC bonding, more speed for your server!

It happens that you need more speed or fault tolerance on your network, in particular regarding your server or your nas.
The most simple solution is the nic bonding or nic teaming!

What nic bonding means?
It means that two or more ethernet adapters are aggregated to speed-up the transmission or to provide a fault tolerance solution.

With Debian Squeeze is very simple to do:

My very fast internet connection...

I'm living in a small town in the south of Brasil named Garibaldi. I love this town because it is clean, happy, quiet and with mannered people. The food is good and the beer is even better... but the internet connection is not as the same level!

How-to: clone an hard disk or grab an image with dd

It happens that you need to clone the content of an hard disk or you want to store the image of a pendrive; if you are a “pure Microsoft user” you must rely on closed source programs but if you are a Linux user (even occasionally) you can do it with a simple live distribution like Ubuntu or similar.

In the case the disks have the same geometry the solution is crazy simple; assuming the original drive is /dev/sdb and the new disk is /dev/sdc the command to parse is:

Linux RAID level and chunk size

In these last days I spent a lot of time searching for the right storage solution for a customer of mine: he needed both speed and reliability.

It is well known I don't like pre-configured solutions so I created a simple Linux NAS with a software RAID 6 array of 6 sata drivers.

When configuring a Linux RAID array, the chunk size needs to get chosen. But what is the chunk size?

How-to: save the WD Caviar Green life

Hello World! :-)

I chose to write my post (and the future posts too) in English due to the fact that quite most of the readers aren't from Italy.

This time I'm writing how to save (almost a bit!) the life of our precious WD Caviar Green HDs.