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« on: December 14, 2017, 11:50:15 am »
Hi Richard,
I'm not quite sure what you are trying to do so sorry for the questions.
1) are all the disks you mention in one box or distributed around several computers?
2) what type of network do you have, wired or wireless and what speed. Also is it via a router or switch?
3) if the disks are in different machines are they all on at the same time?
4) are you trying to maintain mirror images or just data backup/storage?
Now a few observations.
It does not matter what file system the disks are formatted with provided the system they are in can read it - there may be a speed problem but that depends on the system and the age of the disks. Transfer speed, read and write, is very often dependant on the network speed and setup.
An example of a multi disk multi device network.
Here at home I have.
One computer (OS/2 cp2) on 24/7 and it has 4 disks 500GB each with boot partition HPFS all the others JFS and is the main e-mail and tracking unit.
Three 2 disk NAS boxes on 24/7 with each box setup as RAID 1 arrays disk pairs of 1TB, 1.5 TB and 2TB file systems Ext3 and Ext4.
Two computers that get switched on during the day, one is using ArcaOS (my test bed for that OS) with a 2TB disk and HPFS (boot) and JFS partitions. The other is my work computer with two 2TB disks (OS/2 cp2) with HPFS (boot) and JFS.
There are other computers on the network which get switched on and used as necessary, mainly Linux boxes but can be windows units when friends bring one in for 'fixing'.
The network is mainly wired (a gigabit managed switch) with a couple of gigabit wireless APs.
I have access to all the disks and all the data on the network from any computer using SMB/CIFS and/or FTP. When my work computer and the AOS box comes on line they get updated from the e-mail and tracking unit (I am running those two in a mirror setup for testing). Work data is updated to one NAS box every two hours using rsync (a holdover from my working days). The second NAS box gets updated from the first every six hours and the third NAS is a dump unit for storing disk images, master boot image and images of anything for repair.
This is a cut down version of what is at my old company except there we had various industrial systems added with very strange disk formats but they are all readable as and when necessary.