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- Jan 14, 2023
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Thank you! You are awesome!
For clarity: I own 4 drives I specifically purchased for the server, they have seen < 20 spin downs. For whatever reason I purchased tow of the same drives two years ago for my personal PC, they have seen probably around 600-750 spin downs. Consensus seems to be to avoid too many spin down events. One of that is still in my PC the other one is currently a hot spare.
Currently we're using 42% of the available space in raidz2 with 1 hot spare and 1 drive still in my PC.
Additionally I own a 4 TB external drive.
No one can predict the future, both drives from my PC, that have seen more spin downs and are 2 years older are the most likely to fail the first (not entirely true though). That's I would be a bit uneasy with anything less than a fault tolerance of two drives. With that knowledge in mind, let's say I have 6 x 4 TB disks available right now.
Also it needs to be added: yes we should be able to take down the server, wait for the new drive(s) to arrive, burn them in, and then resilver. I would say we could work on internal drives in the meantime and just migrate the changed files later. Most of our stuff is long term storage (photos, videos) and day to day business couldn't be much more than a few documents / photos etc.
I currently have the server, my personal machine and B2 cloud backup as my backup solution. I didn't come up with that kind of redundancy to avoid taking actual backups. If avoidable I'd rather not restore from backup ;) but RAIDZ2 is the level of redundancy I can live with.
In any case in that I don't just move my existing pool to the new server but change the layout, I guess restoring from backblaze would be the safest bet?
Really, thank you so much for all your input!
For clarity: I own 4 drives I specifically purchased for the server, they have seen < 20 spin downs. For whatever reason I purchased tow of the same drives two years ago for my personal PC, they have seen probably around 600-750 spin downs. Consensus seems to be to avoid too many spin down events. One of that is still in my PC the other one is currently a hot spare.
Currently we're using 42% of the available space in raidz2 with 1 hot spare and 1 drive still in my PC.
Additionally I own a 4 TB external drive.
No one can predict the future, both drives from my PC, that have seen more spin downs and are 2 years older are the most likely to fail the first (not entirely true though). That's I would be a bit uneasy with anything less than a fault tolerance of two drives. With that knowledge in mind, let's say I have 6 x 4 TB disks available right now.
Also it needs to be added: yes we should be able to take down the server, wait for the new drive(s) to arrive, burn them in, and then resilver. I would say we could work on internal drives in the meantime and just migrate the changed files later. Most of our stuff is long term storage (photos, videos) and day to day business couldn't be much more than a few documents / photos etc.
No, I just read somewhere that you it is better to already have the redundancy of the hot spare incorporated in RAIDZ3 rather than using RAIDZ2 + hot spare.5 disk, z3, well, in case it's your idea that means you won't need backups, not so.
I currently have the server, my personal machine and B2 cloud backup as my backup solution. I didn't come up with that kind of redundancy to avoid taking actual backups. If avoidable I'd rather not restore from backup ;) but RAIDZ2 is the level of redundancy I can live with.
Number of drives | 4 | 5 | 6 |
---|---|---|---|
RAIDZ2, capacity in TiB | 6,81 | 10,4 | 14 |
RAIDZ3, capacity in TiB | X | 7,25 | 9,9 |
Striped Mirror 2 way, capacity in TiB | 7,25 | X | 10,87 |
Striped Mirror 3 way, capacity in TiB | X | X | ~ 7,25 |
- I would be uneasy with RAIDZ2 and 6 disks, because I fear that two of the disks are more prone to failure then the others. In case of a disk failure and resilvering things could get dangerous quickly. Also 14 TiB worth of storage are not really needed right now.
- Striped mirrors: a three-way mirror would get me 2 drives of redundancy but wouldn't get me any meaningful advantage in terms of space or speed. The latter because if I keep using 1 Gbe ethernet as of right now I wouldn't really profit from faster speeds. For a two way mirror the fault tolerance would still be 1 drive (assuming the next drive that dies kills the mirror), but now I use 6 drives instead of 5 (RAIDZ2). However this is easily expandable.
- RAIDZ3 is probably overkill in terms of redundancy, I agree now.
- Expand to 6 drives raidz2, the drives should fail before I reach the capacity limit. If I'm not mistaken I could then go ahead and buy 6 new drives of larger capacity, if I need more space or just replace a single drive with 4 TB.
- Go for a 2 way striped mirror but only have an 80 % chance that the second drive that dies won't kill the pool.
- Go for a 3 way striped mirror and achieve the same redundancy I have now (if not higher because there still is a 75 % chance a third failure will not kill the pool) and have the same capacity. But expanding now only costs me 3 drives each time and increases the chances that a third failure is not fatal. Again, as soon as I currently need to store more than 4 TB I need to buy new drives to maintain my backup on my PC.
In any case in that I don't just move my existing pool to the new server but change the layout, I guess restoring from backblaze would be the safest bet?
Really, thank you so much for all your input!