No dust is supposed to get "in" the drive, but dust can very well clog the breather hole and cause pressure issues that could kill the drive.
Unless you’re moving the altitude of the drive substantially after it’s already clogged, how would this happen? There’s no air exchange on hard drives.
Unless your drives are in a perfectly controlled temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure environment, those will all impact the internal pressure. Temperature being the primary concern because drives do get rather warm internally while operating.
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…
This is the reason why I would always use RAID 6. A second drive failing during rebuild is significantly likely.
You’re far better off having two raids, one as a daily backup of progressive snapshots that only turns on occasionally to backup and is off the rest of the time.
Unless you’re moving the altitude of the drive substantially after it’s already clogged, how would this happen? There’s no air exchange on hard drives.
Unless your drives are in a perfectly controlled temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure environment, those will all impact the internal pressure. Temperature being the primary concern because drives do get rather warm internally while operating.
Sure, it has some impact, but we’re not talking about anything too crazy. And that also assumes full total clogging of all pores… which is unlikely to happen. You won’t have perfect sealing and pressure will just equalize.
> 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 incurri…
I dislike that article/advice because it’s dishonest / downplaying a limitation of ZFS and advocating that people should spend a lot more money, that may likely not be necessary at all.
What limitation is it downplaying? If there are hidden downsides to the proposed solution, I would certainly like to know.
Compared to a RAID setup, this requires a lot less money. It's really good for residential use.
This is the reason why I would always use RAID 6. A second drive failing during rebuild is significantly likely.
You’re far better off having two raids, one as a daily backup of progressive snapshots that only turns on occasionally to backup and is off the rest of the time.
Fine for on-site backup, but my NAS is mostly for media storage.
Also, many drives are not happy to restart too many times.
>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 bu…
Wouldn't you be protected against cryptolockers by using snapshots?
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.
But if you have a single board computer with 1 GB of RAM and several TB of ZFS, will it just be slow, or actually not run? Granted, my use case was abnormal, and I was evaluating in the early days when there were both license and quality concerns with ZFS on Linux. However, my understanding at the time was that it wouldn't actually work to have several TB in a ZFS pool with 1 GB of RAM. My understanding is that ZFS h…
I would think ZFS would suck on a 1GB machine due to likely being a 32 bit machine.
If you had a 1GB in a 64 bit rig it should be fine.
ZFS does have its own cache (influenced by being Solaris native) but it’s very fast to evict pages.
> 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 bu…
Wouldn't you be protected against cryptolockers by using snapshots?
No, the only proper way to prevent attacks on the data thereof is to keep a backup that isn't readily accessible. Aka offline, whether that's literally turned off or just airgapped from the rest of the infrastructure.
What you need is backup. RAID is not backup and is not for most home/personal users. I learnt that the hard way. Now my NAS use simple volumes only, after all, I really don't have many things I cannot lose on it. If it's something really important, I have multiple copies on different drives, and some offline cold backup. So now if any of my NAS drive is about to fail, I can just copy out the data and replace the driv…
Oh I have backups myself. But parent is more or less talking about a 71TiB NAS for residential usage and being able to ignore the bit rot; in that context such a person probably wouldn't have backup. Personnaly I have long since moved out of raid 5/6 into raid 1 or 10 with versionned backup, at some level of data raid 5/6 just isn't cutting it anymore in case anything goes slightly wrong.
Yep, I get that. I was from there. My NAS is almost 10 years old now, and there are just above 60 TiB data on it, there is nothing I cannot really lose on it. I don't really have a reason to put a 20 bays NAS at home, so simple volumes turned out to be a better option. Repairing a RAID is no fun. I guess most of the ordinary home user like me should probably go with simple volumes. The cost and effort required for a RAID just doesn't justify the benefit for most home users.
That was a decision Linus regretted[1]. There has been some recent discussion about this here on Hacker News[2]. [1] https://linuxiac.com/torvalds-expresses-regret-over-merging-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768
As usual, the top comments in that submission are very biased. I think HN should sort comments in a random order in every polarizing discussion. Anyone reading this, do yourself a favor and dig through both links, or ignore the parent's comment altogether. Linus "regretted" it in the sense "it was a bit too early because bcachefs is moving at such a fast speed", and not in the sense "we got a second btrfs that eats y…