241–250 of 314 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, this is also what I mean with power shenanigans. My server is off most off the time, disconnected. But even if it wasn’t, I just accept the risk.
Assuming you live in the Netherlands judging just by name: our power grid is pretty damn reliable with little shenanigans. I'd take that risk indeed.
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).
Hard drives are often configured to spin down when idle for a certain time. This can cause many spinups and spindowns per day. So I don't buy this at all. But I don't have supporting evidence that back up this notion.
I was under the impression that this was, in fact, known to reduce drive longevity! It is done anyway in order to save power, but the reliability tradeoff is known.
No idea where I read that though, I thought it was "common knowledge" so maybe I'm wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this what a surge protector is for?
Nothing is really going to protect you from a direct lightning strike. Lightning strikes are on the order of millions of volts and thousands of amps. It will arc between circuits that are close enough and it will raise the ground voltage by thousands of volts too. You basically need a lighting rod buried deep into the earth to prevent it hitting your house directly and then you’re still probably going to deal with fr…
Regular reminder: RAID (and ZFS) don't replace backups. It's an availability solution to reduce downtime in event of disk failure. Many things can go wrong with your files and filesystem besides disk failure, eg user error, userspace software/script bugs, driver or FS or hardware bugs, ransomware, etc) The article mentions backups near the end saying eg "most of the data is not important" and the "most important" dat…
Of course, there are still dangers, but ZFS without backup is a big improvement over RAID, and ZFS with backups is a big improvement over most backup strategies.
> 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 ;-)
(source: I wrote it, and it’s all published at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris/tree/master/task/the... )
We also worked with the fan vendor to get parts with a lower minimum RPM. The stock fans idle at about 5K RPM, and ours idle at 2K, which is already enough to keep the system cool under light loads.
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…
This is no longer much of an issue with sealed, helium filled drives, if it ever was.
Do you have a drive rotation schedule? 24 drives. Same model. Likely the same batch. Similar wear. Imagine most of them failing at the same time, and the rest failing as you're rebuilding it due to the increased load, because they're already almost at the same point. Reliable storage is tricky.
That's why you buy different drives from different stores, so you can reduce the chances to get HDDs from the same batch
I wish he had talked more about his movie collection. I’m interested in the methods of selecting initial items as well as ones that survive in the collection for 10+ years.