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Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

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Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#111

Post by f_devd »

cerved wrote: post #75
zozbot234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btrfs RAID is quite infamous for eating your data. Has it been fixed recently?

No. RAID 5/6 is still fundamentally broken and probably won't get fixed

This is incorrect, quoting Linux 6.7 release (Jan 2024):

"This release introduces the [Btrfs] RAID stripe tree, a new tree for logical file extent mapping where the physical mapping may not match on multiple devices. This is now used in zoned mode to implement RAID0/RAID1* profiles, but can be used in non-zoned mode as well. The support for RAID56 is in development and will eventually fix the problems with the current implementation."

I've not kept with more recent releases but there has been progress on the issue

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#112

Post by matt-p »

userbinator wrote: post #91

Reading the part about using foam to make these drives quieter, and the link to the author's other article about putting drives on foam, makes me write this obligatory warning: hard drives do not like non-rigid mounting. Yes, the servo can usually still position the heads on the right track (since it's a servo), but power dissipation will be higher, performance will be lower, and you may get more errors with a non-ri…

Yes. If you need this you are far better off buying SSDs than wasting time on these silly ideas.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#114

Post by _kb »

aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

There's a bit of a trend of vendors packaging mobile CPUs in desktop form factor which are a good candidate for this. Rather than the prebuilt mini PCs this also includes mini-ITX boards. Personally I use the Minisforum BD795i SE, but there are others too.

Check for PCIe bifurcation support. If that's there you can pop in a PCIe to quad M.2 adapter. That will split a PCIe x16 slot into 4 x M.2s. Each of those (and the M.2s already on the motherboard) can then be loaded with either an NVMe drive or an M.2 to SATA adapter, with each adapter providing 6 x SATA ports. That setup gives a lot of flexibility to build out a fairly extensive storage array with both NVMe and spinning platters and no USB in sight.

As a nice side effect of the honestly bonkers amount of compute in those boards there's also plenty of capacity to run other VM workloads on the same metal which lets a lot of the storage access happen locally rather than over the network. For me, that means the on-board 2.5GbE NIC is more than fine, but if not you can also load a M.2 to 10GbE adapter(s) as needed.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#115

Post by econ »

ghostly_s wrote: post #71
econ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to tell you anything. Just unbox and show what they got. I just purchased a bicycle chain cleaning device. It was absurdly cheap. The plastic was extruded poorly, it was hard to assemble, it was not entirely obvious how to use it. However! It did the job and it barely got dirty. I expected it to be full of rusty oil both inside and outside but it accumulated just a tiny smudge on the inlet. If anyone…

God, the flood of absolutely useless "review" videos Amazon has incentivized customers to shit all over their site which are nothing more than unboxings are the worst thing about that ecosystem. No thank you.

Think of it like a football channel, a place to contain such things.

Amazon is just not interested in organizing it properly.

You should have a look what river of fresh nonsense is uploaded to YouTube. The difference is that amazon has you look at it as if something valuable.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#116

Post by lproven »

dragontamer wrote: post #95
lproven wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically RAID does not mean or imply hardware RAID controllers, which you seem to incorrectly assume. Software RAID is still 100% RAID.

And 'softRAID', like what is on for free on Intel motherboards or AMD Motherboards suck and should be avoided. ------ The best advice I can give is to use a real solution like ZFS, Storage Spaces and the like. It's not sufficient to say 'Use RAID' because within the Venn Diagram of things falling under RAID is a whole bunch of shit solutions and awful experiences.

I haven't seen a machine shipped with firmware RAID in decades.

It's still enabled in the firmware of some vendors' laptops -- ones deep in Microsoft's pockets, like Dell, who personally I would not touch unless the kit were free, but gullible IT managers buy the things.

My personal suspicion is that it's an anti-Linux measure. It's hard to convert such a machine to AHCI mode without reformatting unless you have more clue than the sort of person who buys Dell kit.

In real life it's easy: set Windows to start in Safe Mode, reboot, go into the firmware, change RAID mode to AHCI, reboot, exit Safe Mode.

Result, Windows detects a new disk controller and boots normally, and now, all you need to do is disable Bitlocker and you can dual-boot happily.

However that's more depth of knowledge than I've met in a Windows techie in a decade, too.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#117

Post by lproven »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
f_devd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI XFS is not redundant, also RAID usually refers to software RAID these days. I like btrfs for this purpose since it's extremely easy to setup over cli, but any of the other options mentioned will work.

btrfs RAID is quite infamous for eating your data. Has it been fixed recently?

To be fair, your statement could be edited as follows to increase its accuracy:

> btrfs is quite infamous for eating your data.

This is the reason for the slogan on the bcachefs website:

"The COW filesystem for Linux that won't eat your data".

https://bcachefs.org/

After over a decade of in-kernel development, Btrfs still can't either give an accurate answer to `df -h`, or repair a damaged volume.

Because it can't tell a program how much space is free, it's trivially easy to fill a volume. In my personal experience, writing to a full volume corrupts it irretrievably 100% of the time, and then it cannot be repaired.

IMHO this is entirely unacceptable in an allegedly enterprise-ready filesystem.

The fact that its RAID is even more unstable merely seals the deal.

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#118

Post by throawayonthe »

aftbit wrote: post #34

I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular. Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going enterprise or spending an absolute fortune. I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they…

check out the Jonsbo N5 NAS case, you can toss 12 drives and a low power mITX motherboard (see sibling comments) in it for a cheap-ish neat-ish box with a not-proprietary upgrade path

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#119

Post by t312227 »

hello,

thanks for the great article!!

2 remarks from my side:

* some smartctl -a ... output would have been nice ~ i don't care if it is from "when the drives where shipped" or from any later point in time

* prices are somewhat ... aehm ... lets call them "uncompetitive" at least for where i'm at (austria, central-europe, eu)

i compared prices normalized by cost pro TB with new (!) drives from the austrian price-portal "geizhals"

* https://geizhals.at

for example: for 3,5 inches HDDs sorted by "price / TB"

* https://geizhals.at/?cat=hde7s&xf=5704_3.5%22~5717_SATA%203G...

sometimes the prices are slightly higher for the used (!) drives ... sometimes also a bit lower, but imho (!) not enough to justify buying refurbished drives over new (!) ones ...

just my 0.02€

Re: Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

#120

Post by sigio »

The reduction in warranty from 5 years to 1 when buying these doesn't weigh up to the quite limited reduction in price. This would only cover failures during the first few months of runtime, and while most drive-failures will be in the beginning, or after 5+ years, i've seen enough drives die in year 2-5 to prefer some warranty cover, especially on the $200 drives.
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