Re: [gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 09:01:21PM -0600 schrieb Dale:
>
>
>> I just found a IBM ServeRaid M1015 card for like $40.00 shipping and
>> all.  It claims this:  "Connects to up to 16 SAS or SATA drives".  Given
>> the number of drives and the price, that's good bang for buck there. 
> Take not on wether it allows you to address the drives individually or if it
> only does its RAID thingy. For my own personal purposes, I'd never use
> anything that trust my data to a single hardware component. I've heard
> stories of raid cards that if they break, you need an identical replacement
> or the data is kaputt. For that reason I only ever used software RAID which
> makes me independent of the hardware underneath.

I've read that too.  If I do RAID, it will be software.  I'd mix up WD,
Seagate etc too.  If I can't mix brand, I'd certainly want different
batches of drives.  It isn't much but it is something.  I read once
where there is a company that does that for you.  You tell them what
number of drives you need and how they will be set up and they pick them
so that they are different brands and/or batches.  We have all read
about bad batches and I suspect at one time or another, every maker has
had one. 

I have some things that are backed up on a external backup drive that is
usually in my safe.  Some things tho, such as family pictures, that I
can not replace, those I also backup to DVDs or next time, Blu-rays.  I
found a good deal on a Blu-ray burner only to find out it is difficult
to create Blu-ray movies.  I don't think Linux has software to do that
like Devede or something.  I haven't found one anyway.


>> You may want to make note of that for the future.  Maybe you can find a
>> good deal.  It has some good reviews.  I also found some good deals on
>> SAS drives, new even.  Some I found are pulls where they upgrade but
>> never used the drives.  If the price is right, I'm good with that. 
> Sounds like a plan.
>
>> You may want to look on Ebay for a Fractal Node 804, maybe Amazon too. 
> I was making suggestions for you, I am not looking myself. ;-) (Although
> sometimes I wonder whether I should go for a 6-bay system, because I am at
> around 80 % use of capacity now, and though shalt not go over that on ZFS.
> But I have loads of DVDs that I can still convert to more efficient
> compression, giving me back 100s of GB. That's a chore for the upcoming
> holidays.
> When I was planning the build, I think I also looked at the Node 304. But it
> was too big for my taste (I like it small and compact) and had no hot swap.
> I admit I never had any use for hotswapping yet, but it's nice to have and
> to see the idividual HDD leds do their stuff. :)

I only saw pics of it but the thing looks awesome and price here isn't
bad at all.  I just had to share.  ;-)  One never knows when it may come
in handy either for you or someone else googling for this. 


>> I bought a Cooler Master HAF-932 years ago.  As long as mobos fit in it,
>> I'll use it for any future builds.  It has great cooling and quite a bit
>> of hard drive spaces.
> My main PC case was chosen maxed out from the start for what I wanted to do
> with it: one system SSD, one data HDD, one ODD (mainly to watch and store
> video DVDs), one HDD hotswap bay (for old and external drives and for
> backups), space for a not-too-big GPU. It's been running fine for over 6
> years now. Only downside: you get either well made cases, or compact cases.
> It seems both in one case is not available. My case is made from thin
> sheets, which makes the system louder to my ears than necessary.
>

My first rig was fairly large.  It was noisy tho.  Those 80mm fans were
loud when I was doing updates and compiling stuff.  That old CPU was
pumping out heat too.  When I built a new rig, I wanted something
better.  The HAF-932 is certainly that.  I thought I'd never fill that
thing up with drives but as it sits right now, I have one empty 3.5" bay
left.  I could use the 5.25" bays but those require longer cables. 

I try to plan for the future.  Thing is, my crystal ball is broke.  I
still try tho.  lol

>> Looks pretty good too.  I'm not into the LEDs and
>> all that stuff.  Just function, no glitzy stuff required. 
> Design is quite important for me. I don't want glossy surfaces, or
> aggressive gamer designs. I like black boxes. Go ask my ThinkPad or my Eizo
> monitor. :)
>
>> I likely need to jump into RAID but I just do backups.  Then hope for the
>> best.  Weighing positives and negatives gets rough.  ;-)
> A bit OT now, going into the backup subject.
>
> I don't backup the NAS. People say RAID is not a backup. What they mean is
> backup from accidental deletion or malware attacks. To me, it is a backup,
> but from hardware defects. I use RaidZ2 (ZFS-speek for RAID 6), so any two
> of the four drives may fail without loss of data. But with four drives, this
> gives me a space efficiency of only 50 %, hence the thought of going 6-bay.
>
> The most regular "backup" I do is a unison sync of ~ and some other folders
> between PC and laptop. It is very fast and allows me to have everything that
> is important be up-to-date without much effort. But I've never backed up my
> teensie raspi (remember, it contains my PIM server) or my whole laptop ever
> since it got an upgrade to a 2 TB SSD. (My PC's data drive is only 1 TB.)
>
> Before I built my NAS, my largest drive was an external 3 TB USB drive. It
> was my main video storage (naturally w/o backup). Since I built the NAS,
> I've never used it again. So a few weeks ago, I repurposed it as my main
> backup drive. It's at least 6 years old, but only has ~280 hours on the
> meter. In the past, I only (semi-regularly) backed up my main PC via
> rsnapshot to an old 1 TB disk sitting permanently in the swap bay.
>
> I've always wanted to try out borg backup. Thanks to that, I now have a
> backup of my system, home and data partitions of my main PC *and* my laptop,
> plus the entire raspi. But due to to borg's deduplication magic, the 3 TB
> drive is only about half filled, even though it contains several weekly
> snapshots already, amounting to almost 7 TB across hosts.
>


I've seen it said that RAID isn't a backup too.  In a way, it isn't.  In
the case of a house fire or some major disaster, tornado for example,
you could lose the whole puter.  In that case, backups need to be
somewhere else outside the danger area.  RAID can play a part in a lot
of situations but it isn't a cure all either.  Even if I had RAID, I'd
still want a backup somewhere. 

I should use a backup program, snapshot or something here.  I'm not real
sure why I don't other than spending time to figure out how to do it. 
It's likely easy enough but still . . .

Dale

:-)  :-)