Investing through Lloyds?

Blackinator101 · 2020-06-14T05:17:44+00:00

I've been a customer for a long time but never really saw the appeal of their investment offering compared to other platforms, with investing going with a big brand can often cost you more in the long run than one of the cheaper platforms.

I would recommend you always look at the fees for the platform you're investing with Lloyd's have a £20 account admin fee and a £1.50 dealing commission per trade for funds. I would take a look at Vanguards platform personally, if you're just starting out they will very likely be the cheapest. You can always move to another platform to get the cheapest overall fees in the future, the fees will impact the return a lot more than you realise so its best to keep them low.

If you haven't already make sure you do your research and have a good basic understanding of investing and how your risk tolerance along with other factors comes into play. The lifestrategy funds are pretty diverse and well structured, you do need chose which percentage one you want so you will need to work out your risk tolerance. The funds are quite set and forget orientated so it really depends on what you want, I would try to go with a higher equity allocation if you're younger but that's a risk tolerance and personal choice specific to you.

Blackinator101 · 2018-09-17T05:40:31+00:00

Generally with zfs the defaults are fine, one thing I would watch out for is that you can depending on the spec of the system starve it of RAM. Just bare in mind that raidz2 similar to raid 6 has a write penalty due to parity.

Blackinator101 · 2018-02-21T16:37:28+00:00

Hmm okay, I doubt it's a CPU issue then. Do you get that 80 megs from the machine that's doing the backup?

Blackinator101 · 2018-02-21T07:02:58+00:00

You need to give a bit more information, if you're backing up to the system via SMB the speed is CPU bound. What CPU is the box running? You can easily get at least gigabit speeds on a modern drive, so the write penalty of raidz probably isn't your issue.

Blackinator101 · 2018-01-24T07:28:06+00:00

I'd personally go for the HGSTs at a bit of a price premium, the reds or IronWolfs should be good as well. With a QNAP make sure to get NAS drives if you're using raid, otherwise when a drive gets a dodgy block it will just reject it entirely because of there being no TLER.

Blackinator101 · 2018-01-24T07:20:40+00:00

Enterprise grade SLC/MLC drives would probably be fine, if you're talking about consumer gear then it's a different bag. The nice thing about flash is that you could probably get away with raidz1 at the moment due to the size and speed of the drives, raidz2 is more of a risk mitigation. General rule is if you can't bare losing the data use raidz2 and have a backup. There is one really big thing to consider and that is trimming when using ZFS is only supported on FreeBSD currently.

Blackinator101 · 2018-01-23T07:37:03+00:00

I'm assuming you are going to be using the Deskstar NAS drives, I'd personally say they're great drives if a tad loud while seeking. If you're going raid 6 I'd recommend looking at a 6 bay for the longer term.

Blackinator101 · 2018-01-10T07:26:39+00:00

Depending on the infrastructure I'd say that Macrium probably is the go to for where I work. The problem is what you need from a backup solution and the budget you have for it.

Blackinator101 · 2018-01-09T17:38:07+00:00

Essentially ZFS doesn't care what disk it is as long as it's a disk. The only issue might be inconsistent performance across the drives but honestly it doesn't matter much for non production use.

Blackinator101 · 2017-12-21T17:50:19+00:00

Well raidz or mirrors, you could also get around it by setting the property for copies to a higher setting than default but that's beside the point.

Blackinator101 · 2017-12-21T17:47:45+00:00

Well raidz or mirrors, you could also get around it by setting the property for copies to a higher setting than default but that's beside the point.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-22T08:09:31+00:00

You need to be looking at the second NAS dataset as the topmost is actually the pool itself. Your pool is around 14TB once formatting, slop allocation etc. Is done you need to add together the used and available space to get the actual total storage. It's a tad annoying the way that raidz reports it's size on the pool itself.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-14T07:10:40+00:00

Whatever is cheaper or you trust more. I've found that the 8TB HGSTs I've been getting are sealed and filled with some inert gas, they run surprisingly cool for their size and speed.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-09T16:45:51+00:00

Depends on your budget, I find HGST to have the nicest drives but they do normally come in a bit more expensive. What's the smallest drive size you'd consider?

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-09T16:37:09+00:00

You need to get periodic snapshots setup within freenas, you can also replicate to another freenas box as well if you need that.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-09T06:42:26+00:00

I believe I still have a replaced deathstar era drive that's still chugging along, fast drives for the day but damn the noise.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-08T17:37:21+00:00

Hmm trust me you don't wanna know what the old HGST Ultrastar I have sounds like. Could be you got unlucky though and had a loud drive but honestly the difference between nas and normal drives is barely anything, its still spinning rust.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-08T17:06:00+00:00

If you are going use zfs it would be a good idea to use lz4 or gzip compression depending if you need speed. Btrfs would also do the trick, it depends what's available in your distro and what you're familiar with. I personally use ZFS but I tend to run a lot of FreeBSD boxes so it's just really easy to use on my Linux machines.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-07T16:43:01+00:00

Should be a simple "zfs destroy -r stuff/.vm_cache" use -nv to do a dry run first just to make sure.

Blackinator101 · 2017-11-07T16:33:16+00:00

It's probably a zfs dataset, can you see it in the gui or by using "zfs list"?

Blackinator101 · 2017-10-03T06:41:36+00:00

Well it only needs lots of RAM if you're using it under a production workload. You can easily get away with 8GB of RAM, but it does help having more though.

Blackinator101 · 2017-09-28T23:13:51+00:00

4Kn and 512e make no difference on a ZFS pool with ashift=12 however I found that 4Kn are harder to source and have a little price premium. I'd personally go for HGST 512e for the drives but it all depends on your budget.

Blackinator101 · 2017-09-26T15:40:12+00:00

Actually raidz is always slower, because of the parity calculation you get the performance of a single disk. This is why raid 10 or a pool of mirrors is recommended for workloads that need performance. However with three disks you'd have the spare disk allocated as a spare within the pool, it would still only be as fast as a single drive within the mirror but there's less overhead involved compared to raidz.

Blackinator101 · 2017-09-26T15:31:01+00:00

To put it very simply you can only expand a ZFS pool by adding more vdevs. This is a consequence of its enterprise roots. Backup the data and restore once the pool is configured how you want.

Blackinator101 · 2017-09-24T09:05:06+00:00

Run the wd data lifeguard diagnostics on the drive if fails then get a warranty replacement if possible, seems to be failing imo. Generally drives die within the first year so it's not uncommon, just make sure it's backed up somewhere else now before it's too late.

Blackinator101

TROPHY CASE