I’m looking for some advice of best known practices regarding file storage.
I built a new quad core ARM server on Radxa Rock hardware using Debian Jessie. This is for a five user houshold. I have a 5TB hard drive connected locally via USB for storing “Documents”, and separate file servers for different media types.
I have separate external ARM servers that I mounted via SMB for the categories Music, Pictures, and Videos.
Is mounting external storage with SMB a bad idea even if the servers are a decent speed? Am I setting myself up for a lot of orphaned files to deal with? Do you think I should mount external storage with NFS? Or should I really try to mount all my storage with local drives at all cost?
How do you think I should set this up? Thanks in advance.
I have to be honest that if you do some research on Arm local write speed of the many SBC offerings, my honesty has to say its not good. 30mbs read and 5mbs write is quite common and for some reason the write performance on average is extremely poor.
I am sure someone will be able to provide a product that have much better figures than I have quoted, but I have to say of late I have done much research and in generally my opinion is the local storage situation is relatively stinky, in comparison to the reuse and recycle of x86.
There are some USB 3.0 boards that maybe be quite good, many boards share i/o across all ports including network.
Nextcloud is a brilliant system to allow encryption over external storage without the need for system and local encryption and gives choice.
So yeah in a lot of product you might be better just maximizing your i/o usage through your Nic to some form of NAS.
Just my opinion on the last generation of available products and this is changing with some new additions available now and some just about to be released.
Looks like I need to clarify. Thanks for your reply, but I’m actually not concerned about I/O throughput much. I want this system to be a natural bottleneck in my network. I actually don’t want a fast server such as this to cause a bottleneck somewhere else in my network.
I’m primarily concerned about the integrity of file status in the nextcloud database, and similar administration issues.
Nextcloud will be the only app making any changes whatsoever on the external drives. I understand that I need to make that portion work. But, as long as I’m doing that, is there other known issues?
I suppose the reason I have external servers setup for different media types is to allow faster access to those files for other apps such as dlna media servers, and clients playing those files. It also makes upgrading and maintaining those drives a little easier. But I’m primarily concerned about the integrity of the files in the nextcloud server database.
If what I’m doing does tend to cause administration problems, I suppose I could serve everything from nextcloud locally, then sync external drives with a daily rsync cron as a backup, then use those backup servers for my media servers. I was just trying to understand if setting something like this up with large smb mounted drives is known to cause issues.
@tflidd I am running a 32bit system, and I know about that issue. That actually doesn’t affect the client from what I understand because it syncs files in smaller chunks anyway. That limitation is only with the Web interface. I will switch to a 64 bit server eventually.