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My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

louwrentius.com

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Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#51

Post by louwrentius »

throw0101c wrote: post #50

> This NAS is very quiet for a NAS (video with audio). Big (large radius) fans can move a lot of air even at low RPM. And be much more energy efficient. Oxide Computer, in one of their presentations, talks about using 80mm fans, as they are quiet and (more importantly) don't use much power. They observed, in other servers, as much as 25% of the power went just to powering the fans, versus the ~1% of theirs: * https:/…

+1 for mentioning 0xide. I love that they went this route and that stat is interesting. I hate the typical DC high RPM small fan whine.

I also hope that they do something 'smart' when they control the fan speed ;-)

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#52

Post by jiggawatts »

patchymcnoodles wrote: post #24
flounder3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a drop in the bucket for photographers, videographers, and general backups of RAW / high resolution videos from mobile devices. 80TB [usable] was "just enough" for my household in 2016.

Exactly that. I'm not even shooting in ProRes or similar "raw" video. But one video project easily takes 3TB. And I'm not even a professional.

Holy cow, what are you shooting with!?

I have a Nikon Z8 that can output up to 8.3K @ 60 fps raw video, and my biggest project is just 1 TB! Most are on the order of 20 GB, if that.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#53

Post by sss111 »

throw0101c wrote: post #50

> This NAS is very quiet for a NAS (video with audio). Big (large radius) fans can move a lot of air even at low RPM. And be much more energy efficient. Oxide Computer, in one of their presentations, talks about using 80mm fans, as they are quiet and (more importantly) don't use much power. They observed, in other servers, as much as 25% of the power went just to powering the fans, versus the ~1% of theirs: * https:/…

just curious, are you associated with them, as these are very obscure youtube videos :D

Love it though, even the reduction in fan noise is amazing. I wonder why nobody had thought of it before, it seems so simple.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#54

Post by louwrentius »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #7

This sounds to me like it's just a matter of luck and not really a model to be imitated.

It's likely that you are right and that I misjudged the likelihood of this result being special.

You can still imitate the model to save money on power, but your drives may not last longer, no evidence for that indeed.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#55

Post by bearjaws »

I feel like 10 years is when my drives started failing the most.

I run a 8x8tb array zraid2 redundancy, initially it was a 8x2tb array but drives started failing once every 4 months, after 3 drives failed I upgraded the remaining ones.

Only downside to hosting your own is power consumption. OS upgrades have been surprisingly easy.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#56

Post by leighleighleigh »

Regarding the custom PID controller script: I could have sworn the Linux kernel had a generic PID controller available as a module, which you could setup via the device tree, but I can't seem to find it! (grepping for 'PID' doesn't provide very helpful results lol).

I think it was used on nVidia Tegra systems, maybe? I'd be interested to find it again, if anyone knows. :)

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#57

Post by dn3500 »

louwrentius wrote: post #35
renewiltord wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drives have a bathtub curve, but if you want you can be conservative and estimate first year failure rates throughout. So that's p=5/10000 for drive failure. So chance of no-failure per year (because of our assumption) is 1-p. So, chance of no-failure per ten year is (1-p)^10 or about 99.5%

Is that for one drive, or for all 24 drives to survive 10 years?

That's for one drive. For all 24 it's about 88.7%.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#58

Post by throw0101c »

sss111 wrote: post #53
throw0101c wrote: post #50

> This NAS is very quiet for a NAS (video with audio). Big (large radius) fans can move a lot of air even at low RPM. And be much more energy efficient. Oxide Computer, in one of their presentations, talks about using 80mm fans, as they are quiet and (more importantly) don't use much power. They observed, in other servers, as much as 25% of the power went just to powering the fans, versus the ~1% of theirs: * https:/…

just curious, are you associated with them, as these are very obscure youtube videos :D Love it though, even the reduction in fan noise is amazing. I wonder why nobody had thought of it before, it seems so simple.

> just curious, are you associated with them, as these are very obscure youtube videos :D

Unassociated, but tech-y videos are often recommended to me, and these videos got pushed to me. (I have viewed other, unrelated Tech Day videos, so probably why I got that short. Also an old Solaris admin, so aware of Cantril, especially his rants.)

> Love it though, even the reduction in fan noise is amazing. I wonder why nobody had thought of it before, it seems so simple.

Depends on the size of the server: can't really expand fans with 1U or even 2U pizza boxes. And for general purpose servers, I'm not sure how many 4U+ systems are purchased—perhaps some more now that perhaps GPUs cards may be a popular add-on.

For a while chassis systems (e.g., HP c7000) were popular, but I'm not sure how they are nowadays.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#59

Post by rnxrx »

In my experience the environment where the drives are running makes a huge difference in longevity. There's a ton more variability in residential contexts than in data center (or even office) space. Potential temperature and humidity variability is a notable challenge but what surprised me was the marked effect of even small amounts of dust.

Many years ago I was running an 8x500G array in an old Dell server in my basement. The drives were all factory-new Seagates - 7200RPM and may have been the "enterprise" versions (i.e. not cheap). Over 5 years I ended up averaging a drive failure every 6 months. I ran with 2 parity drives, kept spares around and RMA'd the drives as they broke.

I moved houses and ended up with a room dedicated to lab stuff. With the same setup I ended up going another 5 years without a single failure. It wasn't a surprise that the new environment was better, but it was surprising how much better a cleaner, more stable environment ended up being.

Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures

#60

Post by ewalk153 »

leighleighleigh wrote: post #56

Regarding the custom PID controller script: I could have sworn the Linux kernel had a generic PID controller available as a module, which you could setup via the device tree, but I can't seem to find it! (grepping for 'PID' doesn't provide very helpful results lol). I think it was used on nVidia Tegra systems, maybe? I'd be interested to find it again, if anyone knows. :)

Maybe related to this?

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/tools/thermal/...

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