I have a ZFS RAIDZ2 array made of 6x 2TB disks with power on hours between 40,000 and 70,000. This is used just for data storage of photos and videos, not OS drives. Part of me is a bit concerned at those hours considering they’re a right old mix of desktop drives and old WD reds. I keep them on 24/7 so they’re not too stressed in terms of power cycles bit they have in the past been through a few RAID5 rebuilds.

Considering swapping to 2x ‘refurbed’ 12TB enterprise drives and running ZFS RAIDZ1. So even though they’d have a decent amount of hours on them, they’d be better quality drives and fewer disks means less change of any one failing (I have good backups).

The next time I have one of my current drives die I’m not feeling like staying with my current setup is worth it, so may as well change over now before it happens?

Also the 6x disks I have at the moment are really crammed in to my case in a hideous way, so from an aesthetic POV (not that I can actually seeing the solid case in a rack in the garage),it’ll be nicer.

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    14·
    5 months ago

    3:2:1 - Cattle not pets - If your data is backed up in multiple sites, the death of one site shouldn’t overwhelm you, and give you time to recover.

    If your primary site drives are getting above their designed lifetime, rotate them out, sure - but they could be used as part of the backup architecture else where (like a live offsite sync location with enough tolerance for 2 disk failures to account for the age).

    3 copies of your data; 2 types of media; 1 copy offsite.

    • taiidan@slrpnk.netEnglish
      132·
      5 months ago

      I mean if it’s homelab, it’s ok to be pets. Not everything has to be commoditized for the whims of industry.

        • taiidan@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          5 months ago

          I get that. But I think the quote refers to corporate infrastructure. In the case of a mail server, you would have automated backup servers that kick-in and you would simply pull the rack of the failed mail server.

          Replacing drives based on SMART messages (pets) means you can do the replacement on your time and make sure you can do resilvering or whatever on your schedule. I think that is less burdensome than having a drive fail when you’re quite busy and being stressed about having the system is running in a degraded state until you have time to replace the drive.

            • taiidan@slrpnk.netEnglish
              3·
              5 months ago

              Ah, thank you for explaining. I understand where you’re coming from. Nevertheless, from the point of a view a small NAS, RAIDZ1 is much more space and cost efficient so I think there is room for “pets” in the small homelab or NAS.

        • Talaraine@fedia.io
          2·
          5 months ago

          When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line.

          And then Skynet remembers…