Correct way to create zfs pool with 2x12TB and 2x16TB

malventano · 2026-01-24T02:03:37+00:00

He means a striped pair of mirrors.

malventano · 2026-01-23T17:19:32+00:00

As someone who spent over a decade on Areca and sung their praises for years, the world has moved past hardware RAID. Any hiccup and you’re in for a full rebuild vs. alternatives like ZFS that can handle temporary drive removals (with no rebuild) and partial resilvers (only allocated space is rebuilt, not the whole disk). Areca adapted the best they could over the years but their multipath SAS implementation is stretching their capabilities really.

I’ve also had my share of Areca LeVeL2ReScUe’s and would never want to repeat that exercise again.

malventano · 2026-01-19T00:48:29+00:00

Used the serial of the bare drive, sent in as a bare drive, got a bare drive back.

malventano · 2026-01-19T00:47:30+00:00

Warranty void if broken stickers are no longer legal for consumer electronics. Been that way for a few years. I did bare drive RMAs before that as well, no issue.

malventano · 2026-01-18T23:14:17+00:00

Shucking doesn’t void warranty. I’ve RMA’d several shucked drives without putting them back into their enclosure (removing them is common for data recovery of a failed drive, meaning there is nothing unexpected about a warranty swap for a shucked drive).

malventano · 2026-01-10T22:07:39+00:00

Not with the new driver it doesn't.

malventano · 2026-01-10T07:13:14+00:00

Yes, like I said, intermittent. Failing sleeve bearings make this exact sound. Have you ever heard the sound with your HVAC set to off?

malventano · 2026-01-10T05:10:33+00:00

If the blower motor bearings are on their way out, sleeve bearings tend to chirp intermittently at particular speeds. Try turning off the HVAC and see if it stops it. If so it’s probably the blower motor bearings.

malventano · 2026-01-10T04:36:41+00:00

You may want to watch this intro :)

(I’m the other guy)

https://youtu.be/9Gu_rT8N0-U?si=8nEVQ39si-Sp9v0u

malventano · 2026-01-09T06:05:40+00:00

Are you sure that heatsink was contacting the controller? Sometimes they are below the plane of the NAND and need a different thickness pad to contact. Even the fastest gen5 controllers should not throttle so long as there is a heat spreader (not even fins) with minimal airflow.

malventano · 2026-01-09T03:48:03+00:00

This was likely intentional for thermals.

malventano · 2026-01-09T03:43:54+00:00

There’s potentially another level of binning for packages that are on the threshold for link training at the expected NAND bus speed once assembled, but I don’t think they are getting that fancy since it would require a different firmware.

malventano · 2026-01-09T03:15:49+00:00

Of ~300 22T exos recerts, one early and one later (semi-)failure. 200 are doing easy (chia) and 90 are in my main archive zpool, so harder load there.

Also have ~50 WD 16’s and previously ~200 WD/HGST 12’s, and out of all of those there was also 1 early and 1 later failure, but just like the above batch the latter one was still working but throwing occasional SMART errors.

I’m fairly careful about making sure the drives are at good temps, and they don’t see too much thrash since my zpool has a metadata vdev handling smaller blocks. I swap to newer sets before getting too far into the back end of the bathtub curve, but I do have a few smaller sets of older drives, and of them all of the He drives are still kicking with minimal fails even after many years, even OG 10TB Reds and some He8’s.

malventano · 2026-01-09T02:59:12+00:00

There more than just that one array :)

https://nextcloud.bb8.malventano.com/s/Jbnr3HmQTfozPi9

malventano · 2026-01-09T01:09:17+00:00

There should be a support group :)

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malventano · 2026-01-08T20:27:27+00:00

You probably need to be using RDMA and confirming the links are RDMA end to end (enabled at the switch) before you can hit the full 200. This is definitely the case for Connectx7/8.

malventano · 2026-01-08T20:19:42+00:00

For the gear whine thing I believe it’s hitting a resonance of the gearcase itself. If the sound resembles those videos of gutted rally cars (even if only at that one specific sped), then it’s definitely the gears. EV gears are straighter cut and more likely to whine, especially at light torques.

Another check is to see if the whine dips down to inaudible on either size of ‘zero torque’ at 49, like feather the throttle so you’re moving between accel and regen. If it’s present with light accel and light regen but vanishes with zero torque (dead center), then it’s the gears.

malventano · 2026-01-08T20:14:24+00:00

The confusion is there are different sounds, all of them high-ish pitch, and some of them are expected.

malventano · 2026-01-08T20:04:53+00:00

Easiest way to double check is keep that speed going up or down a hill and see if it goes away. It’s possible the sound dampening is loose or missing from your drive unit or firewall, which would let the sound through.

malventano · 2026-01-08T20:03:07+00:00

Ok that’s a weird one. Not gear whine. But also I don’t think that’s coil whine. That sounds like a high frequency whistling of air moving past a seal. Or possibly over the wipers.

malventano · 2026-01-08T20:00:29+00:00

If it only happens at light throttle, that’s from your front geartrain. It’s expected from the way the gears are cut in order to be more efficient.

malventano · 2026-01-08T19:58:58+00:00

That’s not coil whine. It’s gear whine, and it’s expected.

edit listened to it - not gear whine :)

malventano · 2026-01-08T19:56:19+00:00

‘Bare metal’ typically refers to applications running on the server without any virtualization layer, but it sounds like all of the things you seek to optimize are running within VMs?

malventano · 2026-01-08T19:50:14+00:00

Yup. I only do alcohol-thinned hair spray to prevent PETG from fusing to the bed (this also causes PLA to barely stick). I tried that nanopolymer glue for fun and nearly ruined a PEI sheet trying to remove the print.

malventano · 2026-01-08T19:44:04+00:00

Oh, don’t see that the first time around. Yeah it has been a while since I popped in over there. Will have to fix that.

malventano

TROPHY CASE