I have been using ZFS almost two years on servers and it is easy to deal with drive replacements. I have even switched my desktops and laptops to ubuntu 20.04 ZFS for the snapshots.
Issues are learning ZFS and Raids they are not real hard to learn but then replacing drives as they fail = Time vs money saved Do you have the Time to learn and spend swapping?
I have a old synology NAS you or someone  else can have that can be updated to debian and ZFS 5 bay hot swap, great way to start out


On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 5:59 PM Stephen Partington via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
How many drive are you looking to spin up at one time? Across how many machines? 

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 5:39 PM Seabass via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
That is a good question.
Probably not, though.

Have a software raid version? I need to check what these have, but I don't think there is much beyond raid1 and raid0.






-------- Original Message --------
On Dec 30, 2020, 4:02 PM, Rusty Ramser < rusty_ramser@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Seabass.

 

RAID-6 comes to mind, since it will support two disk failures simultaneously... and it sounds like you just may experience that with these disks.  Does your disk controller hardware/software support configuring a RAID-6 array?

 

Cheers.

 

From: PLUG-discuss [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Seabass via PLUG-discuss
Sent: Thursday, 31 December 2020 11:01
To: plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
Cc: Seabass <PrivateSeaBass@pm.me>
Subject: Built for Failure

 


Weird question:

I can get a bunch of ancient (~2013) HDDs. Each have varying amounts of space, and few (if any) are ever the same size.

These were marked to be disposed, though that is just because of age or having plenty that are better. Thus I can take them. However, them being this old, and having found about 3 that eventually broke or never worked, I'm left with this question:

Because purchasing new drives takes too long (no idea when/if they would arrive), I can take as many of the decommissioned drives I'd like. Seeing as some failed, how does one build a system that is resilient to drives failing?

It can be reset as much as wanted, hardware is literally in arm's reach, and there is not burning need for it to be up immediately.
There is also massive (comparatively) external drive space and as many live boot USBs as one might desire.

So how would one build a system that is designed expecting HDD failure regularly?

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