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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

#41

Post by ericd »

dheera wrote: post #33
leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

> I was about to buy a NAS. The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...

I'm considering doing the same, I guess one would basically just be splitting functions, a dedicated NAS, and a dedicated server for all the functions that Synos tend to perform (generally not very well, but at least with pretty low power usage).

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

#42

Post by gambiting »

patrakov wrote: post #27
stirlo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I prefer to have a healthy bank account balance. Storing 18TB (let alone with raid) on SSDs is something only those earning Silicon Valley tech wages can afford.

Not really. I know that my sleep is worth more than the difference between HDD and SSD prices, and I know the difference between the failure rates and the headache caused by the RMA process, so I buy SSDs. In essence, what we together are saying is that people with super-sensitive sleep that are also easily upset, and that don't have ultra-high salaries, cannot really afford 18 TB of data (even though they can afford…

Well, again, well done on being able to afford it. I have 24TB array on cheap second hand drives from CEX for about £100 each, using DrivePool - and guess what, if one of them dies I'll just buy another £100 second hand drive. But also guess what - in the 6 years I had this setup, all of these are still in good condition. Paying for SSDs upfront would have been a gigantic financial mistake(imho).

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

#43

Post by amelius »

beagle3 wrote: post #36
amelius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design flaw.

Individual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time. However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives, almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild — and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to have multiple disconn…

I've had bitflips with USB transfers of 1-10TB. I don't remember the specifics, but my personal confidence in USB is low.

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

#45

Post by lproven »

dragontamer wrote: post #37
LorenPechtel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to survive failure than to prevent failure.

Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically, likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all those calculations without much of a hassle. Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS, unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID. Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But just focus on software solutio…

> 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.

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

#46

Post by zozbot234 »

f_devd wrote: post #39
dragontamer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically, likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all those calculations without much of a hassle. Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS, unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID. Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But just focus on software solutio…

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?

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

#47

Post by f_devd »

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?

I believe RAID5/6 is still experimental (although I believe the main issues were worked out in early 2024), I've seen reports of large arrays being stable since then. It's still recommended to run metadata in raid1/raid1c3.

RAID0/1/10 has been stable for a while.

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

#48

Post by Xss3 »

dheera wrote: post #33
leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

> I was about to buy a NAS. The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it, switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...

I think they just released some new prosumer ups.

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

#49

Post by rovr138 »

leobg wrote: post #19

I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in. The author is using a ThinkPad T430. Any experiences?

You can. It works fine if you know the limitations. An important one is, drives could disconnect, so traditional RAID wouldn't be good.

If you want redundancy, look at something like SnapRAID, http://www.snapraid.it

If you want to combine into a single volume, consider rclone. These remotes specifically are the ones I'm thinking could be useful,

- https://rclone.org/local/

- https://rclone.org/combine/

- https://rclone.org/cache/

Good luck o7

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

#50

Post by beala »

zettabomb wrote: post #38
mannyv wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and wd 8/12/16gb. I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb drives sucked." Well they did, but now they…

RAID is much different. You can try it over USB, you won't have a good time. TrueNAS is primarily talking about RAID users.

Yes I should have specified that this advice is specific to RAID configurations in NAS applications.

If you're occasionally copying data to an external USB drive, that's totally fine. That's what they were designed for.

The issue is that they were not designed for continuous use, or much more demanding applications like rebuilding/resilvering a drive. It's during these applications that issues occur, which is a double whammy, because it can cause permanent data loss if your USB drive fails during a recovery operation. I did a little more research after posting my last comment and came across this helpful post on the TrueNAS forums going into more depth: https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-avoid-usb-attach...

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