[SLE] Home made NAS with SUSE - filesystem questions

Hi!

I'm planning to build a home made NAS using old harware and SUSE. SUSE
might not be the best OS for this, but it's the only Linux I have
administered at least somewhat.

Ok, what I'm thinking is a old PC with lot's of old disks inside and a
gigabit ethernet (planning to do video editing over it also).

I have two questions
1) How to set up the disk system? What I'm thinking is that as I have
pairs of old PATA disks (not identical, but with the same size) I
could set up multiple mirrored sets and then combine these with LVM to
one large volume. This way, if I loose one of the old disks, I do not
loose data. BUT the thing that I'm worried about is... with LVM I can
add more disks to the volume later on. But if I loose one of the old
disks from one of the mirrors, I would not buy the same kind of disk
again - instead, I would have to remove the other part of the mirror
too so that the data is moved to the remaining good mirrors. After a
while, I would be replacing the PATA mirrors with SATA drives in
RAID-5. (Maybe after two years)

Is it possible - also in practice - to remove disks from LVM group so
that the data is kept on the remaining disks?

Does this depend on the file system? Which file system should I use?

2) How to set up SUSE for that kind of use - but this is a longer
story and if you have some small hints, I'm interested, but otherwise,
let's get back to this some other time. (I always, hope they would
define more predefined package groups for installation time, like
Desktop with KDE, laptop with KDE, server with minimal KDE...) Best
option would be to install the system on some kind of flash drive so
that the disks for the data can be stopped when not in use.

--
HG.

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