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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

#131

Post by cm2187 »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #63
turnsout wrote: post #8

I’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).

I think a lot of the advice around keeping the drives running is about avoiding wear caused by spin downs and startups i.e. keeping the "Start Stop Cycles" low. Theres a difference between spinning a drive up/down once or twice a day and spinning it down every 15 minutes or less. Also WD Green drives are not recommended for NAS usage. I know in the past they used to park the read/write head every few seconds or so wh…

Agree. I do weekly backups, the backup NAS is only switched on and off 52 times a year. After 5-6 years the disks are probably close to new in term of usage vs disks that have been running continuously over that same period.

Which leads to another strategy which is to swap the primary and the backup after 5 years to get a good 10y out of the two NAS.

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

#132

Post by int0x29 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #129

> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity. You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house. First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that,…

Isn't this what a surge protector is for?

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

#133

Post by bboygravity »

Gud wrote: post #130
ffsm8 wrote: post #129

> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity. You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house. First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that,…

Electronics is absolutely sensitive to this. Please use filters.

Filters won't help against prolonged periods of higher/lower voltages though.

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

#135

Post by bayindirh »

int0x29 wrote: post #132
ffsm8 wrote: post #129

> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity. You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house. First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that,…

Isn't this what a surge protector is for?

Yes. In most cases, assuming you live in a 220V country, a surge protector will absorb the upwards spike, and the voltage range (a universal PSU can go as low as 107V) will handle the brownout voltage dip.

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

#136

Post by Kerb_ »

int0x29 wrote: post #132
ffsm8 wrote: post #129

> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity. You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house. First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that,…

Isn't this what a surge protector is for?

Pretty sure surge protectors are less effective against dips than they are spikes

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

ffsm8 wrote: post #129

> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity. You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house. First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that,…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by tie-in »

We've been using a multi-TB PostgreSQL database on ZFS for quite a few years in production and have encountered zero problems so far, including no bit flips. In case anyone is interested, our experience is documented here:

https://lackofimagination.org/2022/04/our-experience-with-po...

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

#139

Post by danw1979 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #129

> Losing the system due to power shenanigans is a risk I accept. There is another (very rare) failure an ups protects against, and that's imbalance in the electricity. You can get a spike (up or down, both can be destructive) if there is construction in your area and something happens with the electricity, or lightning hits a pylon close enough to your house. First job I worked at had multiple servers die like that,…

I’ve had firsthand experience of a lightning strike hitting some gear that I maintained…

My parent’s house got hit right on the TV antenna, which was connected via coax down the the booster/splitter unit in comms cupboard … then somehow it got onto the nearby network patch panel and fried every wired ethernet controller attached to the network, including those built into switch ports, APs, etc. In the network switch, the current destroyed the device’s power supply too, as it was trying to get to ground I guess.

Still a bit of a mystery how it got from the coax to the cat5. maybe a close parallel run the electricians put in somewhere ?

Total network refit required, but thankfully there were no wired computers on site… I can imagine storage devices wouldn’t have fared very well.

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

#140

Post by bigiain »

Dalewyn wrote: post #47
turnsout wrote: post #8

I’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…

> The only reasons to turn your hard drives off are to save power, reduce noise, or transport them.

One reason some of my drives get powered down 99+% of the time is that its a way to guard against the whole network getting cryptolockered. i have a weekly backup run by a script that powers up a pair of raid1 usb drives, does and incremental no-delete backup, then unmounts and powers them back down again. Even in a busy week theyre rarely running for more than an hour or two. I'd have to get unlucky enough to not have the powerup script detect being cryptolockered (it checks md5 hashes of a few "canary files") and powering up the bav=ckup drives anyway. I figure that's a worthwhile reason to spin them down weekly...

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