Web Hosting : Building a large storage server, file system and RAID/LVM2

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This web hosting thread started by YYamagishi 0n 06 January 2009

I am looking to build a large file server for media files.
I will be using either Ubuntu or Debian as the server OS.

Although if necessary, I will be looking in to interface cards which will support RAID, I am not looking in to getting one at start.
The motherboard has 6 SATA ports and I will be connecting:
1×320GB HDD
5×1.5TB Seagate HDDs

320GB will be used for the OS and the server software.
As for 5×1.5TB HDDs, I will be merging the space and mounting the drive on to the server software’s data directory.
(I cannot mount the HDDs one by one due to the way the server software is written)

The question is,
1. Which file system should I use?
I read that ext3 has some limitations when it comes to big partition size. I read somewhere that XFS, ZFS and JFS is good. (As for ZFS, I will need to use FUSE)

2. Which technology should I use to merge the HDD space?
RAID 0 and LVM2 is common ways of archieving this but incase of a disk failure with one of the HDDs (physically broken), I assume I’m going to loose all the data and I really don’t want that. (<– Not sure on this information)
I heard RAID 5 is good because it saves parity data but incase of a disk failure (I am aware if the disk failure is with over 2 disks, I cannot recover), can I save the data? If not, then I’m not sure I will want to use RAID 5 as I will have to sacrifice 1.5TB of space.
Also I heard that ZFS can “pool” the HDD space. What happens in case of a disk failure if I have ZFS?
I will be using md for RAID.

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