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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

#301

Post by BSDobelix »

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.

>Everything has a price and people like to have their uncorrupted files, but not at all cost.

I have ZFS on nearly all machines and i don't have any cost, the opposite is actually true because of compression, snapshots an boot environment.

>I bet even 99.9% of HN visitors don’t run ZFS on their laptop/desktop

I really don't care that much what others run since 99.9% of HN don't run FreeBSD...probably, well except HN itself ;)

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

#302

Post by tekknik »

larusso wrote: post #118
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There used to be some tutorials going around to flash the firmware to turn greens into reds I believe. Which simply disables the head parking.

modern 6tb red drives have 256MB of cache while a green only has 64MB. you cant flash in more drive cache!

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

#303

Post by tekknik »

Dalewyn wrote: post #298
dizhn wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how will they both encrypt your machines drive, and the NAS backup with snapshots on it, but yet not defeat the air gap? air gapping is not some magical technique that keeps you secure.

if you really want to protect yourself from crypto lock attacks, which seems odd for an individual to be concerned about (nobody extorts individuals for a few hundred dollars to get the keys, they extort businesses for many thousands of dollars) then you need write once media like MDISC or WORM tapes.

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

#304

Post by tekknik »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #242
louwrentius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Hard drives are often configured to spin down when idle for a certain time. This can cause many spinups and spindowns per day. 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.

It does, and primarily increases the load / unload cycle count. some WD drives are only rated at a few hundred thousand load / unload cycles. it’s best to buy drives that can handle being on always and leave them on.

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

#305

Post by tekknik »

homebrewer wrote: post #201
clan wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

what attachment to bcachefs do you have? the concerns are valid and at first i didn’t read it ask Linus not wanting another btrfs. But now thinking about it, why do we have another competing filesystem being developed at this point at all?

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

#306

Post by tekknik »

eru wrote: post #168
manuel_w wrote: post #160

Discussions on checksumming filesystems usually revolve around ZFS and BTRFS, but has someone any experience with bcachefs? It's upstreamed in the linux kernel, I learned, and is supposed to have full checksumming. The author also seems to take filesystem responsibility seriously. Is anyone using it around here? https://bcachefs.org/

I'm using it. It's been ok so far, but you should have all your data backed up anyway, just in case. I'm trying a combination where I have an SSD (of about 2TiB) in front of a big hard drive (about 8 TiB) and using the SSD as a cache.

i do this on my synoligy using btrfs. i’m still not convinced SSD caching gives any benefit for a home user. 5 spindle drives can already read and write faster than line rate on the NIC (1gbe) so what is the point of adding another failure point?

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

#307

Post by gosub100 »

bitexploder wrote: post #266
lorax wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I"ve heard 2nd-hand that helium will slowly escape (over a period of years).

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

#308

Post by layer8 »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #292
layer8 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand how it is better to have an occasional (= significantly time-delayed) backup. You’ll lose all changes since the last backup. And you’re doubling the cost, compared to just one extra hard drive for RAID 6.

Really important stuff is already being backed up to a second location anyway.

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

#309

Post by eru »

tekknik wrote: post #306
eru wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using it. It's been ok so far, but you should have all your data backed up anyway, just in case. I'm trying a combination where I have an SSD (of about 2TiB) in front of a big hard drive (about 8 TiB) and using the SSD as a cache.

i do this on my synoligy using btrfs. i’m still not convinced SSD caching gives any benefit for a home user. 5 spindle drives can already read and write faster than line rate on the NIC (1gbe) so what is the point of adding another failure point?

> 5 spindle drives can already read and write faster than line rate on the NIC (1gbe) so what is the point of adding another failure point?

SSDs are more about latency than throughput. (And who wants to deal with five spindle drives in a desktop computer?)

In any case, in my case I had the SSD first and bought the HDD to expand my storage capacity.

I don't know whether your use case cares about latency, or about the number of drives. Your trade-offs might be different from mine.

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

#310

Post by CTDOCodebases »

larusso wrote: post #118
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There used to be some tutorials going around to flash the firmware to turn greens into reds I believe. Which simply disables the head parking.

I think I know what you are talking about. I don’t know if it made the green drive identical to a red but it turned on TLER so the green drives wouldn’t co tangly drop out of the raid array.

I’m running a 3 disk ZFS mirror of 8-10yr old greens and are yet to have an issues.

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