Built for Failure

[Ed]

Sounds like you are looking for a RAID case - and time to keep it up
and running. I would see it as an opportunity to try out ZFS
https://openzfs.org/wiki/Main_Page
zfs is ideally suited to working on a bunch of "about to fail" drives
- and it might be the easiest at replacing drive while not risking
data loss of the alternatives.
Just a thought - an interesting PLUG presentation too  ;)

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 4:40 PM Brian Cluff via PLUG-discuss
<plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
> How many drives are you talking about using.  If you have a bunch of them, like 6 to 9 drivers, you could combine them into
> 2 or 3 groups of roughly equal size and then make a each chunk a RAID 0 and then RAID those chunks up with either RAID1 or RAID5/6 depending on how much redundancy you want.   You could also reserve a couple of drives as spares if you wanted then to be able to automatically rebuild the drive if any of the drives fail.
>
> Brian Cluff
>
> On 12/30/20 3:00 PM, Seabass via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>
>
> 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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