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

louwrentius.com

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

#261

Post by throw0101c »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #110
daemonologist wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Those 40mm PSU fans, and the PSU, are what they are replacing with a DC bus bar.

DC (power) in the DC (building) isn't anything new: the telco space has used -48V (nominal) power for decades. Do a search for (say) "NEBS DC power" and you'll get a bunch of stuff on the topic.

Lot's of chassis-based system centralized the AC-DC power supplies.

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

#262

Post by rabf »

louwrentius wrote: post #210
BSDobelix wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people run Windows on their Laptop (without ReFS), and many people use paid data restore services if something "important" gets missing/corrupt. >let’s not pretend it’s such a huge deal Depends on the importance of you data right?

I bet even 99.9% of HN visitors don’t run ZFS on their laptop/desktop. Basically we all take this risk except for a few dedicated nerds. Everything has a price and people like to have their uncorrupted files, but not at all cost.

I find this thinking difficult to reconcile. When I setup up my workstation it does usually take me half a day to sort out an encrypted rootfs mirrored volume with zfsbootmenu + linux, but after that its all set for the next decade. A small price for the peace of mind it affords.

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

#263

Post by Filligree »

rpcope1 wrote: post #113
Jedd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I'd started to add an aside to the effect of 'ten years ago it was probably easier to go ECC'. I'll add it here instead. A decade ago if you wanted ECC your choice was basically Xeon, and all( ) Xeon motherboards would accept ECC. I agree that these days it's much more complex, since you are ineluctably going get sucked into the despair-spiral of trying to work out what combination of Ryzen + motherboard + EC…

Sounds like the answer is to just buy another Xeon then, even if it's a little older and maybe secondhand. I think there's a reason the vast majority of Supermicro motherboards are still just Intel only.

You might also need performance. Or efficiency.

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

#265

Post by generalizations »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #259
otras wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the HN outage where two SSDs both failed after 40k hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243

That's a firmware bug, not wear.

For one reason or another, the drives tended to age out at the same time. Firmware bugs are just hardware failures for solid state devices.

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

#266

Post by bitexploder »

lorax wrote: post #224
bitexploder wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the helium stay in if it is not sealed? I am not familiar with hard drive construction, but helium is notoriously good at escaping.

I think he meant in general drives aren't sealed, except the helium ones are sealed.

Oh, I see. Makes sense. I wonder if dust really can infiltrate a drive? Hmm.

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

#267

Post by [deleted] »

orbital-decay wrote: post #111

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.

[deleted]

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

#268

Post by doublepg23 »

magicalhippo wrote: post #208
doublepg23 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was always FUD more or less. ZFS uses RAM as its primary cache…like every other filesystem, so it if you have very little RAM for caching the performance will degrade…like every other filesystem.

> That was always FUD more or less. To give some context. ZFS support de-duplication, and until fairly recently, the de-duplication data structures had to be resident in memory. So if you used de-duplication earlier, then yes, you absolutely did need a certain amount of memory per byte stored. However, there is absolutely no requirement to use de-duplication, and without it the memory requirements are just a small, f…

I don’t think I came across anyone suggesting zfs dedupe without insisting that it was effectively broken except for very specific workloads.

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

#269

Post by Tinned_Tuna »

orbital-decay wrote: post #111

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.

I've seen this happen to a friend. Back in the noughties they built a home NAS similar to the one in the article, using fewer (smaller) drives. It was in RAID5 configuration. It lasted until one drive died and a second followed it during the rebuild. Granted, it wasn't using ZFS, there was no regular scrubbing, 00s drive failure rates were probably different, and they didn't power it down when not using it. The point is the correlated failure, not the precise cause.

Usual disclaimers, n=1, rando on the internet, etc.

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