A client has asked for 320GB of space but I only have 2x 100GB disks and a 50GB disk.

I'm stuck here, a client has asked for 320GB of space but I only have 2x 100GB disks and a 50GB disk.

Is there a way to give the client what they want?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

From serverfault wildchild

• I 'm stuck here,the client has asked for 320 TB of space but i have only 2 100 TB disk and a 50 TB disk. How do i go for it??! Any help will be greatly appreciated.

  How much do those 1/10th of a petabyte disks cost? I'd like to buy one.

  jae : I'd *like* one of those too, but buying? I'm pretty sure I can't afford one... ;-)

  wildchild : I 'm here to get an answer!! Please explain

  Graeme Donaldson : Nobody's perfect, people make typos. Next time just leave a comment pointing out the error instead of a snarky answer that doesn't add any value.

  taspeotis : You're expecting me to take this question seriously? It's like Grade 1 all over again: "If a client has a house that needs 320 buckets of paint to cover, but you only have 250 buckets, is there a way to give the client what they want?" Yes: buy more paint
  From taspeotis

• Get another 100 GB disk.

  From Axsuul

• Some controllers/OSes let you create a JBOD array (which stands for "Just a Bunch Of Disks") by mixing disks of different sizes. This is the worst possible solution in terms of reliability, but could let you create a 350 GB volume using the disks you have.

  I'd never do it unless having a gun pointed to my head, though.

  Dentrasi : 2*100 + 50 = 250, not 350.

  Massimo : Misread that, sorry.
  From Massimo

• You will either need to buy a new disk, or give your client more effective space by implementing some sort of on-the-fly compression. In the past we had things like stacker and doublespace for such things. NTFS has such capabilities and it is technically possible to do such things with Linux.

  From sybreon

• Maybe I'm just stupid but I would just buy a 320BG drive and be done with it. By the time you buy a smaller drive, plus the various cables and adapters that will be needed to connect 4 addition drives to whatever machine the client has, you'll be up for a pretty similar price. Besides, those other drives are sure to come in handy some other time.

  churnd : I agree. Spanned disks are trouble. 1 fails, you lose the data.
  From John Gardeniers

• What's the budget here?

  It's a pretty important question to answer first. If they've got enough money, buy 2x500GB or 2x1TB disks to allow you to expand more in the future.

  Make sure you're buying pairs of disks and implementing them in RAID1 though.
  I'd hate for you to have to tell your client that a disk failed and all 300GB has gone into the ether.

  For less than a thousand bucks, you could probably buy a 1TB NAS device, holding 4 disks in RAID 5, giving you far more redundancy, reliability and futureproof expansion.

  Dentrasi : For about £700 I got a 4TB NAS (RAID5 gave me 3TB usable). If you are using RAID1, make sure the two disks in it are different models - ideally different brands. Two identical disks, from the same batch, in the same environment are likely to fail at about the same time, which would result in losing your data.

  Tom O'Connor : Very true, although somewhat anecdotal evidence. I've seen some research somewhere (I'll dig it out) that says that no single brand is any more or less likely to fail than any other. I'd be inclined to recommend the QNAP TS-439U-RP. It's a good device with redundant PSUs that also supports iSCSI.
  From Tom O'Connor