What does one do with all this storage?
Especially since it's mostly turned off and it seems like the author is the only user
My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
11–20 of 314 posts
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#12What does one do with all this storage?
For me I have about 35TB and growing in Unraid for Plex/Torrents/Backups/Docker
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#13I’ve heard the exact opposite advice (keep the drives running to reduce wear from power cycling). Not sure what to believe, but I like having my ZFS NAS running so it can regularly run scrubs and check the data. FWIW, I’ve run my 4 drive system for 10 years with 2 drive failures in that time, but they were not enterprise grade drives (WD Green).
Hard drives are often configured to spin down when idle for a certain time. This can cause many spinups and spindowns per day. So I don't buy this at all. But I don't have supporting evidence that back up this notion.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#14What does one do with all this storage?
It's still not enough to hold a local copy of sci-hub, but could probably hold quite a few recorded conference talks (or similar multimedia files) or a good selection of huggingface models.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#15There have been drives where power cycling was hazardous. So, whilst I agree to the model, it shouldn't be assumed this is always good, all the time, for all people. Some SSD need to be powered periodically. The duty cycle for a NAS probably meets that burden. Probably good, definitely cheaper power costs. Those extra grease on the axle drives were a blip in time. I wonder if backblaze do a drive on-off lifetime stat…
> There have been drives where power cycling was hazardous. I know about this story from 30+ years ago. It may have been true then. It may be even true now. Yet, in my case, I don't power cycle these drives often. At most a few times a month. I can't say or prove it's a huge risk. I only believe it's not. I have accepted this risk for over 15+ years. Update: remember that hard drives have an option to spin down when…
In the early '90s, some Quantum 105S hard drives had a "stiction" problem, and were shipped with Sun SPARCstations.
IME at the time, power off a bunch of workstations, such as for building electrical work, and probably at least one of them wouldn't spin back up the next business day.
Pulling the drive sled, and administering percussive maintenance against the desktop, could work.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#16the 'secret' is not that you turn them off. it's simply luck. I have 4TB HGST drives running 24/7 for over a decade. ok, not 24 but 8, and also 0 failures. But I'm also lucky, like you. Some of the people I know have several RMAs with the same drives so there's that. My main question is: What is it that takes 71TB but can be turned off most of the time? Is this the server you store backups?
It can be luck, but with 24 drives, it feels very lucky. Somebody with proper statistics knowledge can probably calculate the risk with a guestimated 1% yearly failure rate how likely it would be to have all 24 drives remaining.
And remember, my previous NAS with 20 drives also didn't have any failures. So N=44, how lucky must I be?
It's for residential usage, and if I need some data, I often just copy it over 10Gbit to a system that uses much less power and this NAS is then turned off again.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There have been drives where power cycling was hazardous. I know about this story from 30+ years ago. It may have been true then. It may be even true now. Yet, in my case, I don't power cycle these drives often. At most a few times a month. I can't say or prove it's a huge risk. I only believe it's not. I have accepted this risk for over 15+ years. Update: remember that hard drives have an option to spin down when…
In the early '90s, some Quantum 105S hard drives had a "stiction" problem, and were shipped with Sun SPARCstations. IME at the time, power off a bunch of workstations, such as for building electrical work, and probably at least one of them wouldn't spin back up the next business day. Pulling the drive sled, and administering percussive maintenance against the desktop, could work. https://sunmanagers.org/1992/0383.htm…
Stiction was definitely a thing back in that general period when you'd sometimes knock a drive to get it back to working again.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#18[deleted]
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#19I’ve heard the exact opposite advice (keep the drives running to reduce wear from power cycling). Not sure what to believe, but I like having my ZFS NAS running so it can regularly run scrubs and check the data. FWIW, I’ve run my 4 drive system for 10 years with 2 drive failures in that time, but they were not enterprise grade drives (WD Green).
Hard drives are often configured to spin down when idle for a certain time. This can cause many spinups and spindowns per day. So I don't buy this at all. But I don't have supporting evidence that back up this notion.
I think NAS systems in particular are often configured to prevent drives from spinning down
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#20the 'secret' is not that you turn them off. it's simply luck. I have 4TB HGST drives running 24/7 for over a decade. ok, not 24 but 8, and also 0 failures. But I'm also lucky, like you. Some of the people I know have several RMAs with the same drives so there's that. My main question is: What is it that takes 71TB but can be turned off most of the time? Is this the server you store backups?
It can be luck, but with 24 drives, it feels very lucky. Somebody with proper statistics knowledge can probably calculate the risk with a guestimated 1% yearly failure rate how likely it would be to have all 24 drives remaining. And remember, my previous NAS with 20 drives also didn't have any failures. So N=44, how lucky must I be? It's for residential usage, and if I need some data, I often just copy it over 10Gbit…
We don't really have to guess. Backblaze posted their stats for 4 TB HGST drives for 2024, and of their 10,000 drives, 5 failed. If OP's 2014 4 TB HGST drives are anything like this, then this is just snake oil and magic rituals and it doesn't really matter what you do.