I’ve been using Linux as a hobbyist for quite some time, but never really explored storage beyond basic partition management. This was mostly because I don’t really have a need for large amounts of storage or redundancy. In fact, I avoided stuff like LVM because I reasoned it would make partition recovery more complex.
But it’s past time I learn some of these technologies, so I’m recycling an old gaming machine to learn about different filesystems and software RAID options. I’ve got a 60GB SSD, 3x1TB 7200 RPM drives and a 2TB 5400 RPM drive (all SATA) that I’ve devoted to this project. Eventually I’d like to turn this box into a Proxmox virtualization server, but the immediate goal is strictly educational.
Any suggestions on which distro I should start with? CentOS or Fedora seems logical since I work in a Red Hat shop, but I’m more familiar with Debian. Should I use the distro installer to build the initial RAID array, or just install the distro to the SSD and use the CLI to build RAID arrays and filesystems (xfs/zfs/btrfs)?