Around 12 years ago I helped design and set up a 48-drive, 9U, ~120TB NAS in the Chenbro RM91250 chassis (still going strong! but plenty of drive failures along the way...). This looks like it's probably the 24-drive/4U entry in the same line (or similar). IIRC the fans were very noisy in their original hot-swappable mounts but replacing them with fixed (screw) mounts made a big difference. I can't tell from the picture if this has hot-swappable fans, though - I think I remember ours having purple plastic hardware.
My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
101–110 of 314 posts
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#102I've had the exact same NAS for over 15 years. It's had 5 hard drives replaced, 2 new enclosures and 1 new power supply, but it's still as good as new...
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#103I’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).
>Not sure what to believe Keep them running. Why?: * The read/write heads experience literally next to no wear while they are floating above the platters. They physically land onto shelves or onto landing zones on the platters themselves when turned off; landing and takeoff are by far the most wear the heads will suffer. * Following on the above, in the worst case the read/write heads might be torn off during takeoff…
Using power creates heat. Thermal cycles are never good. Heating parts up and cooling them down often reduces their life.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#104I’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).
This is completely dependant on access frequency. Do you have a bunch of different people accessing many files frequently? Are you doing frequent backups?
If so then yes, keeping them spinning may help improve lifespan by reducing frequent disk jerk. This is really only applicable when you're at a pretty consistent high load and you're trying to prevent your disks from spinning up and down every few minutes or something.
For a homelab, you're probably wasting way more money in electricity than you are saving in disk maintenance by leaving your disks spin.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#105>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.
> Data integrity is the natural expectation humans have from computers
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: the only reason ZFS isn't the norm is because we all once lived through a primordial era when it didn't exist. No serious person designing a filesystem today would say it's okay to misplace your data.
Not long ago, on this forum, someone told me that ZFS is only good because it had no competitors in its space. Which is kind of like saying the heavyweight champ is only good because no one else could compete.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#106In 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?
Only when checking for finger prints :-)
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#107> It's possible to create the same amount of redundant storage space with only 6-8 hard drives with RAIDZ2 (RAID 6) redundancy.
I've given up on striped RAID. Residential use requires easy expandability to keep costs down. Expanding an existing parity stripe RAID setup involves failing every drive and slowly replacing them one by one with bigger capacity drives while the whole array is in a degraded state and incurring heavy I/O load. It's easier and safer to build a new one and move the data over. So you pretty much need to buy the entire thing up front which is expensive.
Btrfs has a flexible allocator which makes expansion easier but btrfs just isn't trustworthy. I spent years waiting for RAID-Z expansion only for it to end up being a suboptimal solution that leaves the array in some kind of split parity state, old data in one format and new data in another format.
It's just so tiresome. Just give up on the "storage efficiency" nonsense. Make a pool of double or triple mirrors instead and call it a day. It's simpler to set up, easier to understand, more performant, allows heterogeneous pools of drives which lowers risk of systemic failure due to bad batches, gradual expansion is not only possible but actually easy and doesn't take literal weeks to do, avoids loading the entire pool during resilvering in case of failures, and it offers so much redundancy the only way you'll lose data is if your house literally burns down.
https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs...
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a handwavey rule of estimation for dedup, handwavey because dedup scales on number of records, which is going to vary wildly by recordsize.
Additionally unless it's changed in the last six years, you should pretend ZFS dedupe doesn't exist.
Not in a stable release yet, but check out https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/15896 if you have a need for that.
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Don't know the details, but dust could have been impeding the effectiveness of his fans or clumping to create other hotspots in the system (including in the PSU).
Re: My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
#110> 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.
> 80mm is the smallest standard fan (aside from 40mm's in the near-extinct Flex ATX PSU)
Those 40mm PSU fans, and the PSU, are what they are replacing with a DC bus bar.