I have a number of high-capacity hard drives lying around as well as an old computer from around 2010 which has only 4GB of RAM.
Is it possible to use this limited hardware to run a very large storage array?
For example, I know ZFS requires a lot of RAM as storage increases - are there other technologies which do not have such requirements?
11 Answer
To be sure you don't loose data on disk failure, use RAID array. If your HW is something server based, its disk controller may well support HW RAIDs. In that case use it. The type of RAID depends on your needs (RAID1/5/6/10).
Or you can utilize Linux software RAID like mdadm (howtos can be googled easily).
As filesystem I'd decide for Ext4, which is slightly better than Ext3 (I'm not sure of memory requirements difference).
And for sharing you may use either NFS or CIFS (samba), depends on your clients.
If you get stuck on something, come here with more specific questions.
And good luck!
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