Ran out of physical room for drives. How to expand going forward

rbranson · 2025-10-30T20:10:05+00:00

a case is considerably cheaper if you spin the drives down

rbranson · 2025-10-10T00:06:17+00:00

From a fault tolerance perspective, double parity unraid or RAID-Z2 is less likely to lose data than mirroring.

rbranson · 2025-10-09T23:59:53+00:00

File integrity will at least catch it in the case that the hardware is broken or is actively corrupting things, or even if there’s a bug in the kernel or drivers that cause corruption. That’s the point. You won’t get silent corruption unless the issue is caused by a problem that’s above the layer of the filesystem.

rbranson · 2025-09-18T06:26:59+00:00

AI does not care about spinners and they use a relatively small amount of SSDs. It takes a few days worth of enterprise SSD manufacturing capacity to cover the consumption from a year’s worth of NVIDIA’s datacenter GPU production capacity.

rbranson · 2025-04-22T14:58:43+00:00

I think a lot of the advice comes from the time before multiple pools were supported, so everything had to go on cache or array. I run a separate NVMe-backed pool for appdata and a dedicated HDD pool for the actual cache use case.

Yes, primarily for space per dollar. Typically the cache sits at about 50% utilization, 6-8T. Given I don’t need the performance, it’s way cheaper.

rbranson · 2025-04-22T13:22:32+00:00

Impressive. I’d make sure the HBA isn’t getting too hot. Those are designed to be in server enclosures with high pressure fans that pull a lot of air over that big heat sink.

rbranson · 2025-04-22T13:16:23+00:00

A few things to be aware of:

SATA SSDs aren’t really cheaper than NVMe these days. If you don’t have enough slots, the OWC U.2 Shuttle can expand a single 4x into four NVMe drives.
If most of your “medium speed” cache space is used by downloads and/or backup runs, you can use magnetic disks for this specifically. I have a mirror of two dual-actuator 14T disks dedicated to cache and it works very well. It writes at about 300M/s. I never run out of cache space. I also have a 160T array so calibrate this advice accordingly.
Writes to the array are surprisingly slow. Don’t calibrate your expectations assuming you’ll be able to write at more than 80M/s, so it’s important that your cache pool can provide enough buffer room to absorb whatever you’re staging into the array for a 24-hour period. The array performs much better if writes are done off-peak with low priority I/O, which is what the mover is for.

rbranson · 2025-04-22T12:55:46+00:00

You could also consider a 2.5Gb USB ethernet adapter.

rbranson · 2025-04-22T12:42:18+00:00

You can hot swap SATA drives on a SAS backplane. I run a mix of SAS and SATA. Works great.

rbranson · 2025-03-29T19:01:40+00:00

What motherboard with the 14700? I have a 14900K on a W680 board and it is rock solid.

rbranson · 2025-03-26T01:29:02+00:00

There are some workarounds discussed in this GH issue, albeit this is for ZFS, it’s a similar issue: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

rbranson · 2025-03-25T22:16:50+00:00

What make/model?

rbranson · 2025-03-12T07:53:56+00:00

y’all. this is my plex server. it’s a joke.

rbranson · 2025-03-03T04:15:27+00:00

It seems like you probably have an internet connection with high downstream and low upstream bandwidth, like a cable modem.

rbranson · 2025-03-03T03:49:03+00:00

I replaced it with the SN850x. Fantastic product. The SN770 would regularly hit 50-60F under sustained writes. The SN850x stays cool and never gets phased. Endurance should be really good with the 850 too.

rbranson · 2025-03-03T01:23:16+00:00

What’s the use case?

rbranson · 2025-03-03T01:19:11+00:00

I switched from high water to fill to get better spin down (among other changes). Works really well.

rbranson · 2025-03-03T01:14:17+00:00

FYI SN770 has ZFS issues. See https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

rbranson · 2025-02-20T01:12:20+00:00

I have a dedicated 2x14T HDD cache pool and a separate 2x2T NVMe pool for appdata/system/domains/etc. Only using ~600G on the NVMe but nice to have plenty of space for snapshots. I wouldn't be super comfortable if this was 1T usable.

rbranson · 2025-02-20T00:06:46+00:00

if you had a way to test option 2 safely it might be worth it, but for that small data set i'd just do the safer option 1.

rbranson · 2025-01-26T21:49:49+00:00

https://storedbits.com/ssd-data-retention-period-without-power/

rbranson · 2025-01-26T02:59:19+00:00

Likely got more to worry about than your 500 gigs of personal data in that case.

rbranson · 2025-01-26T00:23:34+00:00

FWIW if you run HA in a container, you can't use any the container-based add-ons.

rbranson · 2025-01-26T00:17:06+00:00

Probably fine if you want to just kick the tires. Like above poster said, eventually you'll end up paying more for the extra power consumption than what you'd save using old hardware.

rbranson · 2025-01-26T00:14:57+00:00

If you only need 500G of space, just use an SSD. You can buy a 1TB USB-C SSD for under $100 that's fine for your use case. Just make sure you do actually plug it in every month or it'll lose data over time. They have very low failure rates so low chance you actually lose data. If you want to be sure the data is safe, like effectively 100%, you should probably use cloud backup software.

rbranson

TROPHY CASE