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

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

#91

Post by baby_souffle »

throw0101c wrote: post #58
sss111 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nobod…

> I'm not sure how many 4U+ systems are purchased—perhaps some more now that perhaps GPUs cards may be a popular add-on.

Going from what i see at eCycle places, 4U dried up years ago. Everything is either 1 or 2U or massive blade receptacles (10+ U).

We (the home-lab on a budget people) may see a return to 4U now that GPUs are in vogue but i'd bet that the hyper scalers are going to drive that back down to something that'll be 3U with water cooling or so over the longer term.

We may also see similar with storage systems too; it's only a matter of time before SSD gets "close enough" to spinning rust on the $/gig/unit-volume metrics.

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

#92

Post by giantrobot »

adastra22 wrote: post #72
foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regularly run scrubs and check the data Does this include some kind of built-in hash/checksum system to record e.g. md5 sums of each file and periodically test them? I have a couple of big drives for family media I'd love to protect with a bit more assurance than "the drive did not fail".

Yes, zfs includes file-level checksums.

Block level checksums.

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

#93

Post by bitexploder »

kalleboo wrote: post #86
rnxrx wrote: post #59

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 bas…

A drive failure every 6 months almost sounds more like dirty power than dust, I’ve always kept my NAS/file servers in dusty residential environments (I have a nice fuzzy gray Synology logo visible right now) and never seen anything like that

Drives are sealed anyway. Humidity maybe. Dust can’t really get in. Power or bad batch of drives.

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

#94

Post by jclulow »

adastra22 wrote: post #72
foobarian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regularly run scrubs and check the data Does this include some kind of built-in hash/checksum system to record e.g. md5 sums of each file and periodically test them? I have a couple of big drives for family media I'd love to protect with a bit more assurance than "the drive did not fail".

Yes, zfs includes file-level checksums.

This is not strictly accurate. ZFS records checksums of the records of data that make up the file storage. If you want an end to end file-level checksum (like a SHA-256 digest of the contents of the file) you still need to layer that on top. Which is not to say it's bad, and it's certainly something I rely on a lot, but it's not quite the same!

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

#95

Post by deafpolygon »

stavros wrote: post #80
rnxrx wrote: post #59

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 bas…

How does dust affect things? The drives are airtight.

everything else isn't. the dust can get into power supplies and cause irregularities.

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

#97

Post by daniel-s »

rnxrx wrote: post #59

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 bas…

Does dust matter for SSD drives?

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

#99

Post by daemonologist »

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:/…

Interesting - I'm used to desktop/workstation hardware where 80mm is the smallest standard fan (aside from 40mm's in the near-extinct Flex ATX PSU), and even that is kind of rare. Mostly you see 120mm or 140mm.

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

#100

Post by naming_the_user »

snvzz wrote: post #76

>but for residential usage, it's totally reasonable to accept the risk. Polite disagree. Data integrity is the natural expectation humans have from computers, and thus we should stick to filesystems with data checksums such as ZFS, as well as ECC memory.

I agree.

I think that the author may not have experienced these sorts of errors before.

Yes, the average person may not care about experiencing a couple of bit flips per year and losing the odd pixel or block of a JPEG, but they will care if some cable somewhere or transfer or bad RAM chip or whatever else manages to destroy a significant amount of data before they notice it.

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