I recently acquired two used blade servers and a short rack to put them in. I’m planning to use one or the other as the replacement for a media server that died on me a bit ago. The old media server was just a little refurb dell workstation, with a single SSD in it, but the servers have 6 and 8 bays, respectively.
I would like to RAID them so that one drive dying doesn’t lose any of my media, and I was leaning towards Ubuntu server as an OS. I’m not sure how to do that, and I’m kind of poking around for info and advice. Hit me with it.
mdadm is the tool you can use to create and manage software RAIDs on Linux. You can also manage them with Cockpit.
If you do go with mdadm, my advice is create a partition on each drive that is slightly smaller than the drive itself, and use that as the device in mdadm. That way if you need to replace a drive, and the new one is a few MBs/GBs smaller, you’ll still be able to use it.