Howdy,
I have a simple 8-wide raidz2, 8TB drives. 5 of these are 6 years old, 3 are 5 years old. I am expecting drive failures “any day now” - next year, in 3 years, who knows.
So I am pondering a spare, just in case this fails while I’m traveling for a few weeks. I have room in the case for two (2) spares.
Given the size of the vdev and the relative age of the drives: What would you do? Single spare, or dual spare?
P.S.: Yes I have a send/recv backup. I don’t want to have to use it.
An 8 wide Z2 is pretty solid so I wouldn’t worry too much. Having said that if you have two suitable drives laying around doing nothing then why not add them as spares. I presume you don’t use checkpoints? If so spares won’t kick in when a checkpoint is present.
I’d need to buy the drives, but they’re not expensive. I don’t use checkpoints - snapshots only.
If you’re expecting to replace drives in the coming days/weeks/months then yeah why not. Only other thing to consider is capacity. Do you think you’ll need more space in the coming years or not? If so you might want to consider getting some larger drives to act as spares and when they kick in you only have 6 more to increase capacity.
I probably wouldn’t power down a working system, heat cycle it, add two drives worth of power draw, increase the heat generation in the case, change the airflow in the case, and then leave for a few weeks.
I was thinking 10TB or 12TB drives for the spares, yeah. I don’t think I’ll need more space tbh, but those are the sizes that seem to make sense to me.
It won’t. I assume that the array is hanging in the drive chamber; further drives would go to the floor of the CPU chamber—completely separate airflows.
But since changing drives is somewhat cumbersome, I would do the changes in batches rather than as single drives. And two spares are better than if you’re leaving the server unattended. A resilver would be the most stressful circumstance for old drives, so if one fails due to old age and a spare kicks in, other old drives might follow…
At the moment, tweakers.nl (price engine for the Benelux) indicates that the best price per GB for NAS drives from 8 TB onwards are Toshiba MG10 22TB and 20 TB, then MG11 24TB, MG09 18TB, etc. No drive smaller than 14TB is listed in the first page.
Results may differ in your local market, but rebuilding at 4 to 6-wide with 20-22 TB drives could have benefits.
I’d power down the system while I’m traveling unless whoever is at home needs access to it.
If you’re traveling across borders I would also think long and hard about how you want to handle intrusive customs situation to and fro.
If the aim is to have it up and running + available, then by all means fit a spare or two, you can always remove it / them later.
I’m not taking the system with me, so I don’t have customs concerns. And I’ll definitely leave it running: It’s how we stream music when traveling.
This isn’t about one instance of travel: I expect drives to fail at some point, given their age. Possibly tomorrow, possibly in 10 years.
I think I’ll go and fit 2 12TB spares. Thanks for all the guidance and opinions!
Apologies, I wasn’t very clear. I’d think long and hard about what you carry across customs and whether / how it can connect back to the server.
I bought a Phone that can hold most of my music collection in compressed format. In the past, I also took along upgraded 5th iPods (iFlash to 1TB or so). Slow updates, for sure via the USB1 interface but literally everything talks iPod out there if a physical interface is present.
No need to stream in either case which is great if you end up somewhere w/o cell service. More importantly, you’re not opening doors to your server from countries where you can be compelled to do so without court orders.
For work, we are now issued burner phones and laptops for certain countries. Not because my company does anything illegal. But it is a recognition that lowering your attackable surface is a good idea when crossing borders. Only take that which you absolutely have to, leave everything else behind.
