[gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Howdy,

I got my 10TB drive in today.  I want to maximize the amount of data I
can put on this thing and it remain stable.  I know about -m 0 when
making the file system but was wondering if there is any other tips or
tricks to make the most of the drive space.  This is the output of cgdisk.


Part. #     Size        Partition Type            Partition Name
----------------------------------------------------------------
            1007.0 KiB  free space
   1        9.1 TiB     Linux filesystem          10Tb
            1007.5 KiB  free space


I'm not sure why there seems to be two alignment spots.  Is that
normal?  Already, there is almost 1TB lost somewhere.  Any way to
increase that and still be safe?  Right now, I've ran the short test and
it is chewing on the long test.  It will be done around 7AM tomorrow, 19
or 20 hours to complete.  As it is, there's no data on it or even a file
system either.  Now is the time to tweak things. 

Any tips or ideas would be appreciated. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 2:04 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Part. #     Size        Partition Type            Partition Name
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>             1007.0 KiB  free space
>    1        9.1 TiB     Linux filesystem          10Tb
>             1007.5 KiB  free space
>
>
> I'm not sure why there seems to be two alignment spots.  Is that
> normal?  Already, there is almost 1TB lost somewhere.

10 TB = 9.09495 TiB.  You aren't missing much of anything.

And no, I don't want to get into a religious war over base 2 vs base
10, and why it would be confusing if a tape that could store 10MB/m
didn't store 10kB/mm but instead stored 10.24 kB/mm.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 2:04 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Part. #     Size        Partition Type            Partition Name
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>>             1007.0 KiB  free space
>>    1        9.1 TiB     Linux filesystem          10Tb
>>             1007.5 KiB  free space
>>
>>
>> I'm not sure why there seems to be two alignment spots.  Is that
>> normal?  Already, there is almost 1TB lost somewhere.
> 10 TB = 9.09495 TiB.  You aren't missing much of anything.
>
> And no, I don't want to get into a religious war over base 2 vs base
> 10, and why it would be confusing if a tape that could store 10MB/m
> didn't store 10kB/mm but instead stored 10.24 kB/mm.
>


Well, I realize it would be less than advertised but I just want to
maximize it as much as I can.  I found the -m option for the file system
a good while back and it saves a lot on these larger drives.  Since this
is a external drive, no point in reserving any root space, since root
will likely never access it after the file system is put on it. 

Nice to know it is a conversion thing going on tho.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[David Haller]

Hello,

On Thu, 18 Aug 2022, Dale wrote:
>Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 2:04 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Part. #     Size        Partition Type            Partition Name
>>>             1007.0 KiB  free space
>>>    1        9.1 TiB     Linux filesystem          10Tb
>>>             1007.5 KiB  free space
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not sure why there seems to be two alignment spots.  Is that
>>> normal?  Already, there is almost 1TB lost somewhere.
>> 10 TB = 9.09495 TiB.  You aren't missing much of anything.
[..]
>Well, I realize it would be less than advertised but I just want to
>maximize it as much as I can.  I found the -m option for the file system
>a good while back and it saves a lot on these larger drives.  Since this
>is a external drive, no point in reserving any root space, since root
>will likely never access it after the file system is put on it. 

Also, if you're using ext2/3/4, there's the preset, i.e. if you're
rather sure about what kind of data is going to be on there, you
can tune it so that it reserves more or less place for metadata like
inodes, which can be another bit.

I made some experiments with a temp-repurposed swapfile of 2051M size:

Output of 'df -m':
1M-blocks  Used Available   Inodes   mke2fs-options used
2016    67      1847        131072    -j -t ext4
2016    67      1949        131072    -j -t ext4 -m 0
2048    67      1878        2048      -j -t ext4 -T largefile
2048    67      1981        2048	  -j -t ext4 -T largefile -m 0

So, defaults uses about 1.7% of the space for metadata, and -T
largefile only about 0.15% of the space. Of course, there are rather
few inodes with '-T largefile'. But if you want to put basically only
some big videos on there, 2048 inodes seems a lot for a mere 2G of
space ;) This should scale linearly (in steps) for bigger devices and
can amount to quite some more space.

Anyway, see /etc/mke2fs.conf, 'man mke2fs' and 'man mke2fs.conf for
details.

I've done this in the past and got bitten by too few inodes, but you
can get around that for "inode-hogs" like news-spools etc. by using a
loop-filesystem with different parameters or a different fs. Just
beware: reiserfs on reiserfs is a recipie for desaster.

HTH,
-dnh

-- 
There are two major products that come out of Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
                                   -- Jeremy S. Anderson

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1630 bytes --]

Am Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 06:26:14AM +0200 schrieb David Haller:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thu, 18 Aug 2022, Dale wrote:
> >Rich Freeman wrote:
> >> On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 2:04 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Part. #     Size        Partition Type            Partition Name
> >>>             1007.0 KiB  free space
> >>>    1        9.1 TiB     Linux filesystem          10Tb
> >>>             1007.5 KiB  free space
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I'm not sure why there seems to be two alignment spots.  Is that
> >>> normal?  Already, there is almost 1TB lost somewhere.
> >> 10 TB = 9.09495 TiB.  You aren't missing much of anything.
> [..]
> Also, if you're using ext2/3/4, there's the preset, i.e. if you're
> rather sure about what kind of data is going to be on there, you
> can tune it so that it reserves more or less place for metadata like
> inodes, which can be another bit.

When I format a partition (and I usually use ext4, with some f2fs mingled in
on flash bashed devices), I always set the inode count myself, because the
default was always much too high. Like 15 m on a 40 GiB partition or so. My
arch root partition has 2 m inodes in total, 34 % of which are in use for a
full-fledged KDE setup. That’s sufficient.

On Gentoo, I might give it some more for the ever-growing portage directory.
But even a few percent on a 10 TB drive amount to many gigabytes.

-- 
Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

A hammer is a wonderful tool,
but it is plain unsuitable for cleaning windows.  (SelfHTML forum)

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[William Kenworthy]

On 25/8/22 06:45, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>> [..]
>> Also, if you're using ext2/3/4, there's the preset, i.e. if you're
>> rather sure about what kind of data is going to be on there, you
>> can tune it so that it reserves more or less place for metadata like
>> inodes, which can be another bit.
> When I format a partition (and I usually use ext4, with some f2fs mingled in
> on flash bashed devices), I always set the inode count myself, because the
> default was always much too high. Like 15 m on a 40 GiB partition or so. My
> arch root partition has 2 m inodes in total, 34 % of which are in use for a
> full-fledged KDE setup. That’s sufficient.
>
> On Gentoo, I might give it some more for the ever-growing portage directory.
> But even a few percent on a 10 TB drive amount to many gigabytes.
>
Keep in mind ext4 is created with a fixed number of inodes - you cant 
change it once its created so you have to deal with reformatting the 
filesystem and replacing the data.  Just another reason to use something 
more modern - running out of inodes, especially on a large disk is not a 
minor matter as you have to find somewhere to copy/store the data so you 
can reformat the disk with more inodes and then put it back.  I seem to 
remember the last time it happened to me (its not an uncommon event) I 
had to deal with mass corruption too.

On the other hand, at one inode per file and Dale primarily storing 
large media files it may be safe to reduce them.

BillK

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

William Kenworthy wrote:
>
> On 25/8/22 06:45, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>>> [..]
>>> Also, if you're using ext2/3/4, there's the preset, i.e. if you're
>>> rather sure about what kind of data is going to be on there, you
>>> can tune it so that it reserves more or less place for metadata like
>>> inodes, which can be another bit.
>> When I format a partition (and I usually use ext4, with some f2fs
>> mingled in
>> on flash bashed devices), I always set the inode count myself,
>> because the
>> default was always much too high. Like 15 m on a 40 GiB partition or
>> so. My
>> arch root partition has 2 m inodes in total, 34 % of which are in use
>> for a
>> full-fledged KDE setup. That’s sufficient.
>>
>> On Gentoo, I might give it some more for the ever-growing portage
>> directory.
>> But even a few percent on a 10 TB drive amount to many gigabytes.
>>
> Keep in mind ext4 is created with a fixed number of inodes - you cant
> change it once its created so you have to deal with reformatting the
> filesystem and replacing the data.  Just another reason to use
> something more modern - running out of inodes, especially on a large
> disk is not a minor matter as you have to find somewhere to copy/store
> the data so you can reformat the disk with more inodes and then put it
> back.  I seem to remember the last time it happened to me (its not an
> uncommon event) I had to deal with mass corruption too.
>
> On the other hand, at one inode per file and Dale primarily storing
> large media files it may be safe to reduce them.
>
> BillK

I've already got data on the drive now with the default settings so it
is to late for the moment however, I expect to need to add drives
later.  Keep in mind, I use LVM which means I grow file systems quite
often by adding drives.  I don't know if that grows inodes or not.  I
suspect it does somehow.  This is my current inodes on drives inside my
puter.  I removed the cruft from the list.


root@fireball / # df -i
Filesystem                       Inodes   IUsed     IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda6                       1525920   18519   1507401    2% /
/dev/mapper/OS-usr        2564096  752882   1811214   30% /usr
/dev/sda1                        98392    1219     97173    2% /boot
/dev/mapper/OS-var        3407872  322463   3085409   10% /var
/dev/mapper/home-home--lv 183144448  727910 182416538    1% /home
/dev/mapper/backup-backup  45793280 1359825  44433455    3% /backup
/dev/mapper/crypt         488378368   43027 488335341    1%
/home/dale/Desktop/Crypt
root@fireball / #


The portage tree is on /var on my system.  The ones I am most curious
about is the /home and the crypt one.  As you can see, /home and crypt
is using only a tiny fraction of inodes.  Here is the interesting bit:


root@fireball / # df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6                   23G  2.2G   20G  10% /
/dev/mapper/OS-usr          39G   22G   15G  61% /usr
/dev/sda1                  373M  187M  167M  53% /boot
/dev/mapper/OS-var          52G   23G   26G  47% /var
/dev/mapper/home-home--lv  5.5T  2.6T  2.9T  48% /home
/dev/mapper/backup-backup  688G  369G  319G  54% /backup
/dev/mapper/crypt           15T   12T  3.1T  79% /home/dale/Desktop/Crypt
root@fireball / #


As you can see, /home is about half full, crypt however is pushing 80%
pretty hard.  On /home, I have my documents directory and it has lots of
smaller files compared to crypt.  While /home does have some videos, it
also contains my camera picture directory and the directories for my
trail cameras.  Also, it has small documents such as recipes and such
which can be anywhere from a few kilobytes to maybe 1MB or so, not many
much larger than that.  While I may not want to reduce /home much, I
could likely reduce crypt by 90% and still have a lot left over,
provided that changes when I grow the file system as I add drives etc. 
Yes, I'm already on the hunt for another hard drive to add onto crypt. 

Is there a tool to tell the average size of files in a directory?  Tools
that would help us to know how many inodes one actually needs?  As it
is, I'm doing a lot of updating of old files with larger files, due to
higher resolution of videos.  Example, some videos are going from a
little below 720p to 720p or 1080p.  The difference in file size is
pretty large.  Sometimes double or more. 

This is interesting to consider here.  One doesn't want to run out of
inodes but at the same time, even if I only had 10% of the number I have
now for crypt I'd still have 10 times more than I need with the thing
almost full. This is also true for my backup drives as well.  Two of
them at least.  One that has documents I'd likely leave as is. 

I'm going to have to work on better storage somehow.  All of this is
going to crop up again eventually, likely sooner rather than later. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  I have to close my VPN to check emails still.  Pardon the time
lag in replies compared to the past. 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 8:43 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've already got data on the drive now with the default settings so it
> is to late for the moment however, I expect to need to add drives
> later.  Keep in mind, I use LVM which means I grow file systems quite
> often by adding drives.  I don't know if that grows inodes or not.  I
> suspect it does somehow.

It does not.  It just means that if you want to reformat it you have
to reformat all the drives in the LVM logical volume.  :)

There are filesystems that don't have fixed limits on inodes on
filesystem creation, but ALL filesystems have tradeoffs.  This is one
of the big limitations of ext4, but ext4 also has a number of
advantages over alternatives.  I tend to use zfs but it has its own
issues.  I don't believe inodes are fixed in zfs, but the last time I
looked into it there were potential issues with reducing the size of a
vdev.  (I think that was being worked on but I'm not sure how stable
that is, or if it is compatible with grub.  Actually, one of my pet
peeves has been that finding out exactly what zfs features are
compatible with grub is tricky.  Oh, you can google it, but I don't
think there is any official page that is kept up to date.)

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Jack]

On 8/25/22 08:52, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 8:43 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've already got data on the drive now with the default settings so it
>> is to late for the moment however, I expect to need to add drives
>> later.  Keep in mind, I use LVM which means I grow file systems quite
>> often by adding drives.  I don't know if that grows inodes or not.  I
>> suspect it does somehow.
> It does not.  It just means that if you want to reformat it you have
> to reformat all the drives in the LVM logical volume.  :)

As I remember, if you enlarge a logical volume by adding a new physical 
volume, you then have to expand the filesystem to use that additional 
space.  Looking at resize2fs, it does increase the number of inodes, but 
only linearly in proportion to the amount of increased size.  I don't 
see any way to tell it to decrease, or even just not increase, the 
number of inodes.

Related question - how much space would you actually save by decreasing 
the number of inodes by 90%?  Enough for one or two more videos?

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Jack wrote:
> On 8/25/22 08:52, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 8:43 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I've already got data on the drive now with the default settings so it
>>> is to late for the moment however, I expect to need to add drives
>>> later.  Keep in mind, I use LVM which means I grow file systems quite
>>> often by adding drives.  I don't know if that grows inodes or not.  I
>>> suspect it does somehow.
>> It does not.  It just means that if you want to reformat it you have
>> to reformat all the drives in the LVM logical volume.  :)
>
> As I remember, if you enlarge a logical volume by adding a new
> physical volume, you then have to expand the filesystem to use that
> additional space.  Looking at resize2fs, it does increase the number
> of inodes, but only linearly in proportion to the amount of increased
> size.  I don't see any way to tell it to decrease, or even just not
> increase, the number of inodes.
>
> Related question - how much space would you actually save by
> decreasing the number of inodes by 90%?  Enough for one or two more
> videos?
>
>
>


Now I have to admit, that is a question I have too.  That's why I was
wondering about tools that give info on inodes and such.  It could be it
just is not worth the effort to change the defaults.  Most videos are
either pushing 1GB or around 2GBs, depending on length of video.  If it
only saves a few 100MBs or even a few GBs, it won't really help much. 
The difference just isn't large enough.  If I was storing small files,
then it would but then I'd need those inodes as well.  Sort of a catch
22 there. 

At the moment, I just don't know enough about whether I should change
the defaults or not.  It's one of those, it's not really broke so it may
not need fixing. 

TLDR:  I will say this tho, I'm loving this fast internet even tho my
VPN seems to slow things down some.  Still, it is a LOT faster than DSL
by a huge margin.  Some things download so fast, if I blink, I miss it. 
When I do eix-sync, it is mostly processing things here with the CPU or
organizing files.  Downloading the files tends to be limited by the
server on the other end.  Downloading things like libreoffice, Firefox
etc takes seconds.  I use tail -f to watch it and it goes by really
fast.  My last update was quite large and I think it took less than 2
minutes. 

I'll be getting a new hard drive to add pretty soon.  :-D

While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
them correctly on the new system?  I may try to build a small computer
for a NAS soon.  I'm not sure what is the least I can buy that will
perform well.  I need to look into small mobos to see what options I
have.  I mostly need a CPU to handle moving files, memory to pass it
through and lots of SATA ports.  I figure a fast card for most SATA ports. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 2:59 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
> having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
> them correctly on the new system?

As long as we aren't talking about boot partitions/sectors, the answer
is yes.  As long as all the drives are attached and accessible by the
kernel (necessary drivers/etc present), then LVM will put them
together.  It doesn't care where it finds them, as all the necessary
metadata is stored on the drives and gets scanned.

If you're talking about boot partitions/sectors then it isn't a huge
problem, but you do need to ensure the bootloader can find the right
drives/etc, as it isn't nearly as flexible and may need updates if the
drives switch order/etc, at least for legacy bootloaders.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 2:59 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>> While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
>> having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
>> them correctly on the new system?
> As long as we aren't talking about boot partitions/sectors, the answer
> is yes.  As long as all the drives are attached and accessible by the
> kernel (necessary drivers/etc present), then LVM will put them
> together.  It doesn't care where it finds them, as all the necessary
> metadata is stored on the drives and gets scanned.
>
> If you're talking about boot partitions/sectors then it isn't a huge
> problem, but you do need to ensure the bootloader can find the right
> drives/etc, as it isn't nearly as flexible and may need updates if the
> drives switch order/etc, at least for legacy bootloaders.
>

That's what I was thinking but I was wondering if I had to copy
something from /etc for it to work or not.  It's best to be sure.  ;-) 

I may do some mobo hunting shortly.  See what little thing I can buy
that is powerful enough.  I don't think a Raspberry Pi is enough.  It
gets close tho.  Biggest thing, I'd need a lot of SATA ports.  LOTS of
them. 

Thanks to all.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Mark Knecht]

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On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 4:59 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
> I may do some mobo hunting shortly.  See what little thing I can buy
> that is powerful enough.  I don't think a Raspberry Pi is enough.  It
> gets close tho.  Biggest thing, I'd need a lot of SATA ports.  LOTS of
> them.

Granted, I had a couple of old cases which lowered the cost but
I went to a local computer store and bought used motherboards
that came with processors and memory. They were both Core i7
but I paid only about $75 each. I needed power supplies and hard drives
so each machine ended up around $350 or so by the time I was done.
Each has 2 4TB drives for storage and a 1TB drive for the OS. A lot
of used motherboards have on-board VGA and Gb/S networking.

These are TrueNAS machines, FreeBSD not Linux, but they have
a Linux version now if that makes you more comfortable.

I'd stick with AMD64 as it's better tested and I don't think you'll
get the network throughput you need to be fast with a Raspberry Pi

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

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Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 4:59 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> <SNIP>
> > I may do some mobo hunting shortly.  See what little thing I can buy
> > that is powerful enough.  I don't think a Raspberry Pi is enough.  It
> > gets close tho.  Biggest thing, I'd need a lot of SATA ports.  LOTS of
> > them.
>
> Granted, I had a couple of old cases which lowered the cost but
> I went to a local computer store and bought used motherboards
> that came with processors and memory. They were both Core i7
> but I paid only about $75 each. I needed power supplies and hard drives
> so each machine ended up around $350 or so by the time I was done.
> Each has 2 4TB drives for storage and a 1TB drive for the OS. A lot
> of used motherboards have on-board VGA and Gb/S networking.
>
> These are TrueNAS machines, FreeBSD not Linux, but they have
> a Linux version now if that makes you more comfortable. 
>
> I'd stick with AMD64 as it's better tested and I don't think you'll
> get the network throughput you need to be fast with a Raspberry Pi


I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now,
doesn't even have SATA ports.  I can add a thing called a "hat" I think
that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't
enough.  I really don't like USB and hard drive mixing.  Every time I do
that, the hard drive turns into a door stop.  Currently, I have three
Rosewill external enclosures and they have USB and eSATA ports.  I use
the eSATA connections and no problems.  It's also really fast.  So, I
plan to stick with SATA connections.

I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something
and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform
well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.

I looked at something called ITX but they have only one PCIe slot
usually.  That's not enough.  I'd like to have two 6 or 8 port SATA
cards.  Then balance the drives on each.  I think some of the through
put is shared so the more drives on it, the slower it can be.  I'd like
to have two such cards. 12 or 16 drives should be enough to last a
while.  Part of me wants to do RAID but not sure about that.  Yet.  I
think I'm just going to go with ATX since it has several PCIe slots. 

While I don't think I need a super powerful machine, I do want enough
that it will perform well.  I may use actual NAS software too.  I'm sure
Gentoo would work to with proper tweaking but then I need to deal with
compiling things.  Of course, no libreoffice or anything big so it may
not be to bad.  Thing is, the NAS software will likely be more efficient
since it is designed for the purpose. 

I just know I need a proper machine for the task.  I'm getting lots of
data fast now.  I hit the 80% mark overnight.  At 90%, I consider it
critical.  Something must be done soon. 

Keep those ideas coming.  I'll put them in the blender and see what
comes out.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Gerrit Kuehn]

On Fri, 26 Aug 2022 06:26:39 -0500
Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

> I looked at something called ITX but they have only one PCIe slot
> usually.  That's not enough.  I'd like to have two 6 or 8 port SATA
> cards.  Then balance the drives on each.  I think some of the through
> put is shared so the more drives on it, the slower it can be.  I'd
> like to have two such cards. 12 or 16 drives should be enough to last
> a while.  Part of me wants to do RAID but not sure about that.  Yet.
> I think I'm just going to go with ATX since it has several PCIe
> slots. 

Usually, an ITX mainboard will feature a PCIe slot /and/ additional
onboard SATA connectors. So you might be fine with an 8port controller
card and the onboard connections.
However, even if you want 16 SATA connections on one PCIe card, you can
buy that. Broadcom SAS 9201-16i is one example. If that is enough
bandwidth-wise will depend on your PCIe slot and the drives you're
going to attach.
I don't see any reason to do hardware raid these days, just a HBA and
software raid (zfs or other solutions) should be fine.
Everything just my 2¢ here, of course...


cu
  Gerrit

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 7:26 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now, doesn't even have SATA ports.

The Pi4 is definitely a step up from the previous versions in terms of
IO, but it is still pretty limited.  It has USB3 and gigabit, and they
don't share a USB host or anything like that, so you should get close
to full performance out of both.  The CPU is of course pretty limited,
as is RAM.  Biggest benefit is the super-low power consumption, and
that is something I take seriously as for a lot of cheap hardware that
runs 24x7 the power cost rapidly exceeds the purchase price.  I see
people buying old servers for $100 or whatever and those things will
often go through $100 worth of electricity in a few months.

How many hard drives are you talking about?  There are two general
routes to go for something like this.  The simplest and most
traditional way is a NAS box of some kind, with RAID.  The issue with
these approaches is that you're limited by the number of hard drives
you can run off of one host, and of course if anything other than a
drive fails you're offline.  The other approach is a distributed
filesystem.  That ramps up the learning curve quite a bit, but for
something like media where IOPS doesn't matter it eliminates the need
to try to cram a dozen hard drives into one host.  Ceph can also do
IOPS but you're talking 10GbE + NVMe and big bucks, and that is how
modern server farms would do it.

I'll describe the traditional route since I suspect that is where
you're going to end up.  If you only had 2-4 drives total you could
probably get away with a Pi4 and USB3 drives, but if you want
encryption or anything CPU-intensive you're probably going to
bottleneck on the CPU.  It would be fine if you're more concerned with
capacity than storage.

For more drives than that, or just to be more robust, then any
standard amd64 build will be fine.  Obviously a motherboard with lots
of SATA ports will help here.  However, that almost always is a
bottleneck on consumer gear, and the typical solution to that for SATA
is a host bus adapter.  They're expensive new, but cheap on ebay (I've
had them fail though, which is probably why companies tend to sell
them while they're still working).  They also use a ton of power -
I've measured them using upwards of 60W - they're designed for servers
where nobody seems to care.  A typical HBA can provide 8-32 SATA
ports, via mini-SAS breakout cables (one mini-SAS port can provide 4
SATA ports).  HBAs tend to use a lot of PCIe lanes - you don't
necessarily need all of them if you only have a few drives and they're
spinning disks, but it is probably easiest if you get a CPU with
integrated graphics and use the 16x slot for the HBA.  That or get a
motherboard with two large slots (they usually aren't 16x, but getting
4-8x slots on a consumer motherboard isn't super-common).

For software I'd use mdadm plus LVM.  ZFS or btrfs are your other
options, and those can run on bare metal, but btrfs is immature and
ZFS cannot be reshaped the way mdadm can, so there are tradeoffs.  If
you want to use your existing drives and don't have a backup to
restore or want to do it live, then the easiest option there is to add
one drive to the system to expand capacity.  Put mdadm on that drive
as a degraded raid1 or whatever, then put LVM on top, and migrate data
from an existing disk live over to the new one, freeing up one or more
existing drives.  Then put mdadm on those and LVM and migrate more
data onto them, and so on, until everything is running on top of
mdadm.  Of course you need to plan how you want the array to look and
have enough drives that you get the desired level of redundancy.  You
can start with degraded arrays (which is no worse than what you have
now), then when enough drives are freed up they can be added as pairs
to fill it out.

If you want to go the distributed storage route then CephFS is the
canonical solution at this point but it is RAM-hungry so it tends to
be expensive.  It is also complex, but there are ansible playbooks and
so on to manage that (though playbooks with 100+ plays in them make me
nervous).  For something simpler MooseFS or LizardFS are probably
where I'd start.  I'm running LizardFS but they've been on the edge of
death for years upstream and MooseFS licensing is apparently better
now, so I'd probably look at that first.  I did a talk on lizardfs
recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbMRcVrdsQs

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 7:26 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now, doesn't even have SATA ports.
> The Pi4 is definitely a step up from the previous versions in terms of
> IO, but it is still pretty limited.  It has USB3 and gigabit, and they
> don't share a USB host or anything like that, so you should get close
> to full performance out of both.  The CPU is of course pretty limited,
> as is RAM.  Biggest benefit is the super-low power consumption, and
> that is something I take seriously as for a lot of cheap hardware that
> runs 24x7 the power cost rapidly exceeds the purchase price.  I see
> people buying old servers for $100 or whatever and those things will
> often go through $100 worth of electricity in a few months.
>
> How many hard drives are you talking about?  There are two general
> routes to go for something like this.  The simplest and most
> traditional way is a NAS box of some kind, with RAID.  The issue with
> these approaches is that you're limited by the number of hard drives
> you can run off of one host, and of course if anything other than a
> drive fails you're offline.  The other approach is a distributed
> filesystem.  That ramps up the learning curve quite a bit, but for
> something like media where IOPS doesn't matter it eliminates the need
> to try to cram a dozen hard drives into one host.  Ceph can also do
> IOPS but you're talking 10GbE + NVMe and big bucks, and that is how
> modern server farms would do it.
>
> I'll describe the traditional route since I suspect that is where
> you're going to end up.  If you only had 2-4 drives total you could
> probably get away with a Pi4 and USB3 drives, but if you want
> encryption or anything CPU-intensive you're probably going to
> bottleneck on the CPU.  It would be fine if you're more concerned with
> capacity than storage.
>
> For more drives than that, or just to be more robust, then any
> standard amd64 build will be fine.  Obviously a motherboard with lots
> of SATA ports will help here.  However, that almost always is a
> bottleneck on consumer gear, and the typical solution to that for SATA
> is a host bus adapter.  They're expensive new, but cheap on ebay (I've
> had them fail though, which is probably why companies tend to sell
> them while they're still working).  They also use a ton of power -
> I've measured them using upwards of 60W - they're designed for servers
> where nobody seems to care.  A typical HBA can provide 8-32 SATA
> ports, via mini-SAS breakout cables (one mini-SAS port can provide 4
> SATA ports).  HBAs tend to use a lot of PCIe lanes - you don't
> necessarily need all of them if you only have a few drives and they're
> spinning disks, but it is probably easiest if you get a CPU with
> integrated graphics and use the 16x slot for the HBA.  That or get a
> motherboard with two large slots (they usually aren't 16x, but getting
> 4-8x slots on a consumer motherboard isn't super-common).
>
> For software I'd use mdadm plus LVM.  ZFS or btrfs are your other
> options, and those can run on bare metal, but btrfs is immature and
> ZFS cannot be reshaped the way mdadm can, so there are tradeoffs.  If
> you want to use your existing drives and don't have a backup to
> restore or want to do it live, then the easiest option there is to add
> one drive to the system to expand capacity.  Put mdadm on that drive
> as a degraded raid1 or whatever, then put LVM on top, and migrate data
> from an existing disk live over to the new one, freeing up one or more
> existing drives.  Then put mdadm on those and LVM and migrate more
> data onto them, and so on, until everything is running on top of
> mdadm.  Of course you need to plan how you want the array to look and
> have enough drives that you get the desired level of redundancy.  You
> can start with degraded arrays (which is no worse than what you have
> now), then when enough drives are freed up they can be added as pairs
> to fill it out.
>
> If you want to go the distributed storage route then CephFS is the
> canonical solution at this point but it is RAM-hungry so it tends to
> be expensive.  It is also complex, but there are ansible playbooks and
> so on to manage that (though playbooks with 100+ plays in them make me
> nervous).  For something simpler MooseFS or LizardFS are probably
> where I'd start.  I'm running LizardFS but they've been on the edge of
> death for years upstream and MooseFS licensing is apparently better
> now, so I'd probably look at that first.  I did a talk on lizardfs
> recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbMRcVrdsQs
>


This is some good info.  It will likely start off with just a few hard
drives but that will grow over time.  I also plan to have a large drive
as a spare as well, in case one starts having issues and needs replacing
quick.  I'd really like to be using RAID at least the two copies one but
may take time, plus I got to learn how to do the thing. ;-)

I may use NAS software.  I've read/seen people use that and it is on a
USB stick or something.  They say once it is booted up, it doesn't need
to access the USB stick much.  I guess it is set to load into memory at
boot up, like some rescue media does.  I think that uses ZFS for the
file system which is a little like LVM.  The bad thing about using that
tho, I may not be able to just move the drives over to the new NAS since
it may not accept LVM well.  I don't know much on that yet.  I may end
up having to buy drives and just rsync them over.  One good thing, I
have a 1GB capable router.  It even has fast wifi if I get that.  Plus,
I'll have extra drives depending on how I work this.

My first thing, buy a case to organize all this.  I looked at a Fractal
Design Node 804 case.  It is a NAS case.  I think it can handle a wide
variety of mobos too.  It can also hold a lot of drives as well.  Eight
if I recall.  If I put the OS on a USB stick or something, that is a lot
of drive spaces.  I may could add a drive cage if needed.  It's a fair
sized case and certainly a good start. 

It will take me a while to build all this.  Thing is, since I'll use it
like a backup tool, I need to be able to put it in a safe place.  I wish
I could get a fire safe to stick it into.  The biggest part is 16" I
think.  Plenty of cooling as well.  I wish I had another Cooler Master
HAF-932 like I have now but that almost certainly won't fit in a fire
safe.  Dang thing is huge.  ROFL 

Lots to think on. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Mark Knecht]

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On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:27 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
>
> I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now,
doesn't even have SATA ports.  I can add a thing called a "hat" I think
that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't enough.  I
really don't like USB and hard drive mixing.  Every time I do that, the
hard drive turns into a door stop.  Currently, I have three Rosewill
external enclosures and they have USB and eSATA ports.  I use the eSATA
connections and no problems.  It's also really fast.  So, I plan to stick
with SATA connections.

You do NOT want  the Rasp Pi for this. You would have to compile and
maintain the OS yourself just adding work and the disk interfaces aren't
high performance enough.

Obviously you can do what you are most comfortable with but to me a NAS
machine with a bunch of external drives does not sound very reliable.

>
> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something and
I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform well
enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.

That's more than enough horsepower for TrueNAS Core. If the box will hold 3
drives then you have 1 system drive and 2 data drives for a ZFS RAID1.
That's how both of my NAS boxes are set up.

You can buy more memory at lots of places inexpensively but you don't need
it to start. 4GB will work with TrueNAS Core. My machines have 8 & 12GB. I
never use it all.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/

Even if your old box has only 2 drives, download TrueNAS and just set it up
on one systemdrive. It's not Gentoo difficult. It's a fully formed install
system which will probably be running in an hour. You can use 1 drive in
your data tank and add additional drives later.

The speed of a NAS is _mostly_ a balance between network speed and disk
speed. Processor usage for me is generally about 20%. If your network is
GigaBit then you can sustain somewhere about 850Mb/S on the cables which
translates nicely to about 100 MegaByte/S on your disk drives. There isn't
that much CPU usage as it's mostly compression when backing up.

Unless you use the box as a file server getting data back off is a once in
a while event where you don't care too much about speed, or at least I
don't.

Just do it. Download the install disc and give it a try. Nothing much to
lose.

Good luck.
Mark

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 10:09 AM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Obviously you can do what you are most comfortable with but to me a NAS machine with a bunch of external drives does not sound very reliable.
>

I would have thought the same, but messing around with LizardFS I've
found that the USB3 hard drives never disconnect from their Pi4 hosts.
I've had more issues with LSI HBAs dying.  Of course I have host-level
redundancy so if one Pi4 flakes out I can just reboot it with zero
downtime - the master server is on an amd64 container.  I only have
about 2 drives per Pi right now as well - at this point I'd probably
add more drives per host but I wanted to get out to 5-6 hosts first so
that I get better performance especially during rebuilds.  Gigabit
networking is definitely a bottleneck, but with all the chunkservers
on one switch they each get gigabit full duplex to all the others so
rebuilds are still reasonably fast.  To go with 10GbE you'd need
hardware with better IO than a Pi4 I'd think, but the main bottleneck
on the Pi4 I'm having is with encryption which hits the CPU.  I am
using dm-crypt for this which I think is hardware-optimized.  I will
say that zfs encryption is definitely not hardware-optimized and
really gets CPU-bound, so I'm running zfs on top of dm-crypt.  I
should probably consider if dm-integrity makes more sense than zfs in
this application.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Mark Knecht]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2727 bytes --]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 7:25 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 10:09 AM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Obviously you can do what you are most comfortable with but to me a NAS
machine with a bunch of external drives does not sound very reliable.
> >
>
> I would have thought the same, but messing around with LizardFS I've
> found that the USB3 hard drives never disconnect from their Pi4 hosts.
> I've had more issues with LSI HBAs dying.  Of course I have host-level
> redundancy so if one Pi4 flakes out I can just reboot it with zero
> downtime - the master server is on an amd64 container.  I only have
> about 2 drives per Pi right now as well - at this point I'd probably
> add more drives per host but I wanted to get out to 5-6 hosts first so
> that I get better performance especially during rebuilds.  Gigabit
> networking is definitely a bottleneck, but with all the chunkservers
> on one switch they each get gigabit full duplex to all the others so
> rebuilds are still reasonably fast.  To go with 10GbE you'd need
> hardware with better IO than a Pi4 I'd think, but the main bottleneck
> on the Pi4 I'm having is with encryption which hits the CPU.  I am
> using dm-crypt for this which I think is hardware-optimized.  I will
> say that zfs encryption is definitely not hardware-optimized and
> really gets CPU-bound, so I'm running zfs on top of dm-crypt.  I
> should probably consider if dm-integrity makes more sense than zfs in
> this application.
>
> --
> Rich

Quite interesting Rich. Thanks!

My needs may be too 'simple'. I'm not overly worried about the government
or foreign actors invading my world. (Even though I'm sure they could.) I
just have a router-based firewall. My backup machines are powered down
unless they are being used and they don't respond to wake-up over the
network so they are safe enough for me. The one in my office backs up
my two machines (desktop and video file server) and the second
NAS backs up the first. They are both ZFS RAID1 using TrueNAS. I
don't use encryption at all. A real dummy...

But again, I'm not even a Gentoo user any more. I'm a KDE user
and I could see no performance improvement using Gentoo over
Kubuntu. My updates happen once a week, roughly, and never
take more than 5 minutes. In 4 years I've never had an update
fail. Kubuntu just works for me - but I'll be the first to admit I don't
know what's running on my machine anymore so I'm not much better
than being a Windows user in terms of control.

In the old days (2001) I was a computer OS enthusiast. Today
I play guitar, bake bread and drink a little wine. Life and focus
changed. For a guy at home life is ok and I have backups to boot.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

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Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 7:25 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org
> <mailto:rich0@gentoo.org>> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 10:09 AM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com
> <mailto:markknecht@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >
> > > Obviously you can do what you are most comfortable with but to me
> a NAS machine with a bunch of external drives does not sound very
> reliable.
> > >
> >
> > I would have thought the same, but messing around with LizardFS I've
> > found that the USB3 hard drives never disconnect from their Pi4 hosts.
> > I've had more issues with LSI HBAs dying.  Of course I have host-level
> > redundancy so if one Pi4 flakes out I can just reboot it with zero
> > downtime - the master server is on an amd64 container.  I only have
> > about 2 drives per Pi right now as well - at this point I'd probably
> > add more drives per host but I wanted to get out to 5-6 hosts first so
> > that I get better performance especially during rebuilds.  Gigabit
> > networking is definitely a bottleneck, but with all the chunkservers
> > on one switch they each get gigabit full duplex to all the others so
> > rebuilds are still reasonably fast.  To go with 10GbE you'd need
> > hardware with better IO than a Pi4 I'd think, but the main bottleneck
> > on the Pi4 I'm having is with encryption which hits the CPU.  I am
> > using dm-crypt for this which I think is hardware-optimized.  I will
> > say that zfs encryption is definitely not hardware-optimized and
> > really gets CPU-bound, so I'm running zfs on top of dm-crypt.  I
> > should probably consider if dm-integrity makes more sense than zfs in
> > this application.
> >
> > --
> > Rich
>
> Quite interesting Rich. Thanks!
>
> My needs may be too 'simple'. I'm not overly worried about the government 
> or foreign actors invading my world. (Even though I'm sure they could.) I
> just have a router-based firewall. My backup machines are powered down
> unless they are being used and they don't respond to wake-up over the
> network so they are safe enough for me. The one in my office backs up
> my two machines (desktop and video file server) and the second
> NAS backs up the first. They are both ZFS RAID1 using TrueNAS. I
> don't use encryption at all. A real dummy...
>
> But again, I'm not even a Gentoo user any more. I'm a KDE user
> and I could see no performance improvement using Gentoo over
> Kubuntu. My updates happen once a week, roughly, and never
> take more than 5 minutes. In 4 years I've never had an update
> fail. Kubuntu just works for me - but I'll be the first to admit I don't
> know what's running on my machine anymore so I'm not much better
> than being a Windows user in terms of control. 
>
> In the old days (2001) I was a computer OS enthusiast. Today 
> I play guitar, bake bread and drink a little wine. Life and focus
> changed. For a guy at home life is ok and I have backups to boot.


I have looked into OpenNAS and other NAS OS stuff.  Some are on USB
sticks and basically, you shut it down, upgrade the USB stick, insert it
back into NAS and boot up.  Then again, if it doesn't have a GUI type
stuff, I could run Gentoo or something and updates wouldn't be to large
since it is a base system mostly.  I read once where a guy set up a NAS
and it ran for years without ever even being rebooted.  I think his
uptime was like 5 or 6 years.  It was one of those 'out of sight, out of
mind' type things.  He actively used it but never updated it or even
blew the dust out of it.  Then one day it hit him, I better check that
thing.  LOL 

I do plan to use encryption and they will be locked when not in use.  I
use cryptsetup commands to do all that.  I think it is dmcrypt on the
low level stuff.  It's one reason I wanted to stay away from the
Raspberry.  It is low power which is great but not so much when using
encrypted files.  Then there is the USB to SATA thing that I've had bad
experiences with.  It's not like hal but still, I've had hard drives in
USB enclosures turn into door stops.  I just don't trust it.  It would
make me worry, a lot.

This certainly something I need to deal with tho.  This fast internet is
like poking a hornets nest.  It's causing all kinds of problems.  ROFL 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Mark Knecht]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 948 bytes --]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:21 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
<SNIP>
> I have looked into OpenNAS and other NAS OS stuff.  Some are on USB
sticks and basically, you shut it down, upgrade the USB stick, insert it
back into NAS and boot up.
<SNIP>

The first version of TrueNAS I used was on a USB stick and it worked fine
so I'm fairly confident you'd be at least functional.

One advantage of starting out this way was is that you can try multiple NAS
systems on different flash drives without making a hard commitment.

Keep in mind stuff like log files gets written to the OS drive whether it's
a flash drive or not so long term it wasn't a solution I wanted to stick
with long term. In my case I have about 30 old hard drives from old
machines so I just found one and used it. In my case it was a 1TB WD Green
drive circa 2012 that I purchased for a RAID but learned the hard way not
to use. ;-)

Whatever you do, have fun.

Cheers,
Mark

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Mark Knecht]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 699 bytes --]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:37 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:21 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> <SNIP>
> > I have looked into OpenNAS and other NAS OS stuff.  Some are on USB
sticks and basically, you shut it down, upgrade the USB stick, insert it
back into NAS and boot up.
> <SNIP>
>
> The first version of TrueNAS I used was on a USB stick and it worked fine
so I'm fairly confident you'd be at least functional.

One last thing for now - if you do buy a used MB do some research into
whether it will actually boot from USB. One of the ones I bought actually
did not do that so I had to dig up a old DVD drive to install from a CD.

- M

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1264 bytes --]

Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:37 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com
> <mailto:markknecht@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:21 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >
> > <SNIP>
> > > I have looked into OpenNAS and other NAS OS stuff.  Some are on
> USB sticks and basically, you shut it down, upgrade the USB stick,
> insert it back into NAS and boot up.
> > <SNIP>
> >
> > The first version of TrueNAS I used was on a USB stick and it worked
> fine so I'm fairly confident you'd be at least functional.
>
> One last thing for now - if you do buy a used MB do some research into
> whether it will actually boot from USB. One of the ones I bought
> actually did not do that so I had to dig up a old DVD drive to install
> from a CD.
>
> - M


I've got a older donated machine that doesn't boot from USB too.  The
newer donated machine does, I've booted from USB sticks before.  I'm
going to pull the side off and see how many drives it can hold and such
in a bit.  If I gather up enough steam.  As it is, I only need three at
the moment, four maybe later.  Most come with six but this is a factory
built machine.  I can't recall what it comes with. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 



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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Michael]

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On Sunday, 28 August 2022 00:30:08 BST Dale wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:37 PM Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com
> > 
> > <mailto:markknecht@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:21 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> > 
> > <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > > <SNIP>
> > > 
> > > > I have looked into OpenNAS and other NAS OS stuff.  Some are on
> > 
> > USB sticks and basically, you shut it down, upgrade the USB stick,
> > insert it back into NAS and boot up.
> > 
> > > <SNIP>
> > > 
> > > The first version of TrueNAS I used was on a USB stick and it worked
> > 
> > fine so I'm fairly confident you'd be at least functional.
> > 
> > One last thing for now - if you do buy a used MB do some research into
> > whether it will actually boot from USB. One of the ones I bought
> > actually did not do that so I had to dig up a old DVD drive to install
> > from a CD.
> > 
> > - M
> 
> I've got a older donated machine that doesn't boot from USB too.  The
> newer donated machine does, I've booted from USB sticks before.  I'm
> going to pull the side off and see how many drives it can hold and such
> in a bit.  If I gather up enough steam.  As it is, I only need three at
> the moment, four maybe later.  Most come with six but this is a factory
> built machine.  I can't recall what it comes with. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 

Depending on the age of the MoBo, even if it can't boot from USB, it should be 
able to boot with 'pixie'.  Set up a tftp PXE server on your LAN and the old 
MoBo will fetch the image(s) to boot with.  You can take a look here for 
ideas:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/
Installation_alternatives#Diskless_install_using_PXE_from_the_LiveCD

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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Am Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 07:09:32AM -0700 schrieb Mark Knecht:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 4:27 AM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> <SNIP>
> >
> > I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now,
> doesn't even have SATA ports.  I can add a thing called a "hat" I think
> that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't enough.  I
> really don't like USB and hard drive mixing.  Every time I do that, the
> hard drive turns into a door stop.  Currently, I have three Rosewill
> external enclosures and they have USB and eSATA ports.  I use the eSATA
> connections and no problems.  It's also really fast.  So, I plan to stick
> with SATA connections.

Is there a particular reason why your mailer inserts the quote character
only on the first line of a quote paragraph? It makes reading your replies a
little difficult because it is not visible on first glance where your quote
ends and your reply starts.

> You do NOT want  the Rasp Pi for this. You would have to compile and
> maintain the OS yourself just adding work and the disk interfaces aren't
> high performance enough.

Why is that? My raspi runs on bog-standard Raspberry OS (i.e. Debian). I am
also evalutating Arch on arm. Both don’t require any compilation or manual
maintenance on my part. Just the regular updates via the package manager.

> The speed of a NAS is _mostly_ a balance between network speed and disk
> speed. Processor usage for me is generally about 20%. If your network is
> GigaBit then you can sustain somewhere about 850Mb/S on the cables which
> translates nicely to about 100 MegaByte/S on your disk drives.

If the NAS is attached via gigabit only, I would bot concern myself with not
saturating. Those 117 MB/s is nothing a drive can’t handle in most cases.
(Especially if used in a RAID in whatever form).

-- 
Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

„Someone who defines a problem already solved half of it. “ – Julian Huxley

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Wol]

On 28/08/2022 22:07, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Is there a particular reason why your mailer inserts the quote character
> only on the first line of a quote paragraph? It makes reading your replies a
> little difficult because it is not visible on first glance where your quote
> ends and your reply starts.

Because the OPs mailer sent it as one line per paragraph?

My mailer (Tbird) is configured for plain text, but still screws up when 
it receives html junk.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Mark Knecht]

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On Sun, Aug 28, 2022 at 2:33 PM Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On 28/08/2022 22:07, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> > Is there a particular reason why your mailer inserts the quote character
> > only on the first line of a quote paragraph? It makes reading your
replies a
> > little difficult because it is not visible on first glance where your
quote
> > ends and your reply starts.
>
> Because the OPs mailer sent it as one line per paragraph?
>
> My mailer (Tbird) is configured for plain text, but still screws up when
> it receives html junk.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol


My address is GMail, and I just use Chrome. Responding to this list
requires me to Ctrl-A and then remove ALL formatting which inserts
the greater than symbol.

For 99% of my life no one cares about how an email response is
formatted. The only place that complains is this list so I do all of
that above to try to make it better for the list.

Maybe I made a mistake on the recent response that Frank
doesn't like? If it's happening on every email I send then what
Frank is seeing is not what I'm seeing.

In my experience it's easier to ride the Google horse in the
direction the Google horse is going. Turning off all formatting
causes too many problems in real life outside of Gentoo
email lists.

My apologies,
Mark

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Wol]

On 28/08/2022 22:53, Mark Knecht wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2022 at 2:33 PM Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk 
> <mailto:antlists@youngman.org.uk>> wrote:
>  >
>  > On 28/08/2022 22:07, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>  > > Is there a particular reason why your mailer inserts the quote 
> character
>  > > only on the first line of a quote paragraph? It makes reading your 
> replies a
>  > > little difficult because it is not visible on first glance where 
> your quote
>  > > ends and your reply starts.
>  >
>  > Because the OPs mailer sent it as one line per paragraph?
>  >
>  > My mailer (Tbird) is configured for plain text, but still screws up when
>  > it receives html junk.
>  >
>  > Cheers,
>  > Wol
> 
> 
> My address is GMail, and I just use Chrome. Responding to this list
> requires me to Ctrl-A and then remove ALL formatting which inserts
> the greater than symbol.
> 
> For 99% of my life no one cares about how an email response is
> formatted. The only place that complains is this list so I do all of
> that above to try to make it better for the list.

Well, a lot of us are greybeards who predate HTML. Grumpy old greybeards 
don't like change :-) and I include myself in that.
> 
> Maybe I made a mistake on the recent response that Frank
> doesn't like? If it's happening on every email I send then what
> Frank is seeing is not what I'm seeing.
> 
> In my experience it's easier to ride the Google horse in the
> direction the Google horse is going. Turning off all formatting
> causes too many problems in real life outside of Gentoo
> email lists.
> 
HTML is f*cked up for so many things (for which clueless idiots 
recommend it). At work, living inside the GMail/Chrome eco-system is 
mandatory. And I regularly swear at it because I get over-wide emails 
that are a bastard to read.

> My apologies,
> Mark
> 
Don't apologise - it's not your fault. If you use gmail/chrome, that's 
fine. It would just be nice if Google didn't screw up your mail. The 
really scary thing is all these things Google do behind your back are 
capable of (and as far as the linux guys are concerned regularly do) 
screwing up your security.

If you want to interact with linux devs you will find they are even more 
anti-gmail than here - because what you are sending is not what you 
think you are sending! But until then, don't beat yourself up over it. 
Don't upset people unnecessarily, but if it causes you grief, don't do 
it. If people don't like it, they can ignore it.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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Am Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 06:26:39AM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now,
> doesn't even have SATA ports.  I can add a thing called a "hat" I think
> that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't
> enough.

I run a raspi with some basic services, most importantly a pihole DNS filter
and a PIM server. But I find it hacky-patchy with its flimsy USB power cable
poking out of the side. I’d prefer a more sturdy construction, which is why
I bought a NAS-style PC (zotac zbox nano with a passive 6 W Celeron). But
that thing is so fast for every-day computing that I actually put a KDE
system on it and now I don’t want to “downgrade” it to a mere server.

> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something
> and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform
> well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.

An Intel Celeron from the Haswell generation (i.e. 8+ years old) did not
have AES-NI yet, and it reached around 160 MB/s encryption speed. I tried
it, because I had dealings with those processors in the past before I built
my own NAS. Your old tech may still be usable, but please also consider
power cost and its impact on the environment if it runs 24/7.

> I looked at something called ITX but they have only one PCIe slot
> usually.  That's not enough.  I'd like to have two 6 or 8 port SATA
> cards.  Then balance the drives on each.  I think some of the through
> put is shared so the more drives on it, the slower it can be.  I'd like
> to have two such cards. 12 or 16 drives should be enough to last a
> while.
>
> Part of me wants to do RAID but not sure about that.

Dealing with so many drives, I think there’s no getting around RAID. All
drives fail. The more drives you have, the earlier the first failure. With
that many drives, I wouldn’t want to handle syncs between them by hand in
order to get redundancy or backups of backups.

> While I don't think I need a super powerful machine, I do want enough
> that it will perform well.

The question is: what do you need it to perform? If it’s just storing and
serving files, save the bucks and use any low-end x86 processor with AES
instructions. My NAS first ran on the above mentioned Celeron, but later I
did upgrade to a low-power i3 (because the case¹ is very cramped, I don’t
want too much heat in there). It is a dual-core with SMT and AES at 35 W.
IIRC, it can encrypt around 800-something MB/s. And that is an old i3-4170.
Modern chips are most probably much faster still.

> I may use actual NAS software too.

What is “actual NAS software”? Do you mean a NAS distribution? From my
understanding, those distros install the usual services (samba, ftp, etc.)
and develop a nice web frontend for it. But since those are web
applications, there isn’t much to be gained from march=native.

I still run Gentoo on my NAS, just for the old habit and because it comes
with ZFS right out of the box. But the services I still configure the
classical way – ssh, vim and config files.

>   I'm sure Gentoo would work to with proper tweaking but then I need to
> deal with compiling things.  Of course, no libreoffice or anything big so
> it may not be to bad.  Thing is, the NAS software will likely be more
> efficient since it is designed for the purpose. 

More efficient than what?

My NAS is powered up every few weeks or often months. And then the first
thing I do is—of cours—a world update. And as you mentioned, the install
base is rather small. No graphical stuff whatsoever (server board, small
ASMedia VGA chip on-board, no Intel graphics). The biggest pkgs are gcc
(around 2 hours build time) and llvm. The rest is user land stuff that helps
me in dealing with the media files the NAS serves. Mkvtoolnix is a compile
hog at around half an hour.

> I just know I need a proper machine for the task.  I'm getting lots of
> data fast now.  I hit the 80% mark overnight.  At 90%, I consider it
> critical.  Something must be done soon. 

How about watching the spoils for a change instead of only ever downloading
it? ;-)


¹ https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/ipc/storage-cases/sc-4100
-- 
Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

Everything has its two sides. But a quadrangle has three.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 06:26:39AM -0500 schrieb Dale:
>
>> I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now,
>> doesn't even have SATA ports.  I can add a thing called a "hat" I think
>> that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't
>> enough.
> I run a raspi with some basic services, most importantly a pihole DNS filter
> and a PIM server. But I find it hacky-patchy with its flimsy USB power cable
> poking out of the side. I’d prefer a more sturdy construction, which is why
> I bought a NAS-style PC (zotac zbox nano with a passive 6 W Celeron). But
> that thing is so fast for every-day computing that I actually put a KDE
> system on it and now I don’t want to “downgrade” it to a mere server.
>


I googled that little guy and that is a pretty neat little machine. 
Basically it is a tiny puter but really tiny, just not tiny on
features.  The Zotac systems, even some older ones, are pretty nifty.  I
think I read they have a ITX mobo which is really compact.  It sort of
reminds me of a cell phone.  Small but fast CPUs, some even have decent
amounts of ram so they can handle quite a lot.  Never heard of this
thing before.  I wouldn't mind having one of those to work as my OpenVPN
server thingy.  I'd just need to find one that has 2 ethernet ports and
designed for that sort of task. 


>> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something
>> and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform
>> well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.
> An Intel Celeron from the Haswell generation (i.e. 8+ years old) did not
> have AES-NI yet, and it reached around 160 MB/s encryption speed. I tried
> it, because I had dealings with those processors in the past before I built
> my own NAS. Your old tech may still be usable, but please also consider
> power cost and its impact on the environment if it runs 24/7.

I'm not real sure what that old machine has.  I have Linux, can't recall
the distro tho, on it.  Is there a way to find out if it supports the
needed things?  Since I'd mostly be using it as a backup system, it
won't run all the time.  I usually do backups on weekends when I update
the OS.  Recently tho, since the internet is so fast, I have done it
twice a week.  Just keep in mind, all this is encrypted. 


>> I looked at something called ITX but they have only one PCIe slot
>> usually.  That's not enough.  I'd like to have two 6 or 8 port SATA
>> cards.  Then balance the drives on each.  I think some of the through
>> put is shared so the more drives on it, the slower it can be.  I'd like
>> to have two such cards. 12 or 16 drives should be enough to last a
>> while.
>>
>> Part of me wants to do RAID but not sure about that.
> Dealing with so many drives, I think there’s no getting around RAID. All
> drives fail. The more drives you have, the earlier the first failure. With
> that many drives, I wouldn’t want to handle syncs between them by hand in
> order to get redundancy or backups of backups.
>

It's a step I need to take but I have to accumulate the needed drives
first.  I'm getting there tho, slowly. 


>> While I don't think I need a super powerful machine, I do want enough
>> that it will perform well.
> The question is: what do you need it to perform? If it’s just storing and
> serving files, save the bucks and use any low-end x86 processor with AES
> instructions. My NAS first ran on the above mentioned Celeron, but later I
> did upgrade to a low-power i3 (because the case¹ is very cramped, I don’t
> want too much heat in there). It is a dual-core with SMT and AES at 35 W.
> IIRC, it can encrypt around 800-something MB/s. And that is an old i3-4170.
> Modern chips are most probably much faster still.
>
>> I may use actual NAS software too.
> What is “actual NAS software”? Do you mean a NAS distribution? From my
> understanding, those distros install the usual services (samba, ftp, etc.)
> and develop a nice web frontend for it. But since those are web
> applications, there isn’t much to be gained from march=native.
>
> I still run Gentoo on my NAS, just for the old habit and because it comes
> with ZFS right out of the box. But the services I still configure the
> classical way – ssh, vim and config files.

I've seen TrueNAS, OpenNas I think and others.  Plus some just use
Ubuntu or something.  Honestly, almost any linux distro with no or a
minimal GUI would work. 


>>   I'm sure Gentoo would work to with proper tweaking but then I need to
>> deal with compiling things.  Of course, no libreoffice or anything big so
>> it may not be to bad.  Thing is, the NAS software will likely be more
>> efficient since it is designed for the purpose. 
> More efficient than what?
>
> My NAS is powered up every few weeks or often months. And then the first
> thing I do is—of cours—a world update. And as you mentioned, the install
> base is rather small. No graphical stuff whatsoever (server board, small
> ASMedia VGA chip on-board, no Intel graphics). The biggest pkgs are gcc
> (around 2 hours build time) and llvm. The rest is user land stuff that helps
> me in dealing with the media files the NAS serves. Mkvtoolnix is a compile
> hog at around half an hour.

I figure something like OpenNAS or TrueNAS would work better as it is
built to be user friendly and has tools by default to manage things. 
I'm pretty sure they support RAID and such by default.  It is likely set
up to make setting it up easier too. 


>> I just know I need a proper machine for the task.  I'm getting lots of
>> data fast now.  I hit the 80% mark overnight.  At 90%, I consider it
>> critical.  Something must be done soon. 
> How about watching the spoils for a change instead of only ever downloading
> it? ;-)
>
>
> ¹ https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/ipc/storage-cases/sc-4100


I've likely watched everything I download at least twice.  I admit, I
like things from back in the 70s, 80s and such quite a lot.  Most shows
today are just trash, I'm trying to be polite.  ;-) 

Thanks for the info.  Especially the little tiny Zotack thing.  One neat
little machine. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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Am Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 12:49:56AM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> > I run a raspi with some basic services, most importantly a pihole DNS filter
> > and a PIM server. But I find it hacky-patchy with its flimsy USB power cable
> > poking out of the side. I’d prefer a more sturdy construction, which is why
> > I bought a NAS-style PC (zotac zbox nano with a passive 6 W Celeron). But
> > that thing is so fast for every-day computing that I actually put a KDE
> > system on it and now I don’t want to “downgrade” it to a mere server.
>
> I googled that little guy and that is a pretty neat little machine. 
> Basically it is a tiny puter but really tiny, just not tiny on
> features.  The Zotac systems, even some older ones, are pretty nifty.  I
> think I read they have a ITX mobo which is really compact.

ITX (or rather miniITX) is 17×17 cm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX
Those NUC-types are much smaller. I don’t quite know whether that board form
factor has a name of its own (aside from NUC, but that’s a marketing name
from Intel).

> It sort of reminds me of a cell phone.  Small but fast CPUs, some even
> have decent amounts of ram so they can handle quite a lot.  Never heard of
> this thing before.  I wouldn't mind having one of those to work as my
> OpenVPN server thingy.  I'd just need to find one that has 2 ethernet
> ports and designed for that sort of task. 

Many of the ZBoxes have dual NICs, which is what makes them very popular
among server and firewall hackers because they are also very frugal. My
particular model is the CI331:
https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-ci331-nano-barebone
It has one 2,5″ slot and one undocumented SATA M.2 which can only be reached
by breaking the warranty seal. That’s where zotac installs a drive if you
buy a zbox with Winblows pre-installed.

After updating the BIOS, which allowed the CPU to enter lower C states, it
draws 6 W on idle. It’s not a record, but still not so much for a 24/7 x86
system.

> >> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something
> >> and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform
> >> well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.
> > An Intel Celeron from the Haswell generation (i.e. 8+ years old) did not
> > have AES-NI yet, and it reached around 160 MB/s encryption speed. I tried
> > it, because I had dealings with those processors in the past before I built
> > my own NAS. Your old tech may still be usable, but please also consider
> > power cost and its impact on the environment if it runs 24/7.
> 
> I'm not real sure what that old machine has.  I have Linux, can't recall
> the distro tho, on it.  Is there a way to find out if it supports the
> needed things?

cat /proc/cpuinfo and look for aes or the like. Or enter the processor name
into wikipedia, which will redirect you to the “List of processors by
<Manufacturer>” with huge tables of comparision and general info on an
architecture’s improvements over its predecessor, like AES.

> >> I may use actual NAS software too.
> > What is “actual NAS software”? Do you mean a NAS distribution? From my
> > understanding, those distros install the usual services (samba, ftp, etc.)
> > and develop a nice web frontend for it. But since those are web
> > applications, there isn’t much to be gained from march=native.
> 
> I've seen TrueNAS, OpenNas I think and others.  Plus some just use
> Ubuntu or something.  Honestly, almost any linux distro with no or a
> minimal GUI would work. 

OK, but then you don’t run those on Gentoo. And those NAS distros are so
small and light-weight, they can be run from a USB stick if you so choose.
My NAS’s mainboard has a USB-A socket on-board for that reason.

> >>   I'm sure Gentoo would work to with proper tweaking but then I need to
> >> deal with compiling things.  Of course, no libreoffice or anything big so
> >> it may not be to bad.  Thing is, the NAS software will likely be more
> >> efficient since it is designed for the purpose. 
> > More efficient than what?

> I figure something like OpenNAS or TrueNAS would work better as it is
> built to be user friendly and has tools by default to manage things. 

Yeah, I was thinking of using one of those, too. But I liked the idea of
being more flexible with some ZFS voodoo which the web interfaces won’t
allow. Like creating a downgraded pool because I don’t have enough HDDs, filling
that up and adding the missing disk later. Sometimes I wish for the bigger
ease of use of a web interface.

> I'm pretty sure they support RAID and such by default.  It is likely set
> up to make setting it up easier too. 

They do, naturally. And yes, the frontends hide lots of the gory details.

-- 
Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

Even baldies do have streaks of luck.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> Am Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 12:49:56AM -0500 schrieb Dale:
>
>>> I run a raspi with some basic services, most importantly a pihole DNS filter
>>> and a PIM server. But I find it hacky-patchy with its flimsy USB power cable
>>> poking out of the side. I’d prefer a more sturdy construction, which is why
>>> I bought a NAS-style PC (zotac zbox nano with a passive 6 W Celeron). But
>>> that thing is so fast for every-day computing that I actually put a KDE
>>> system on it and now I don’t want to “downgrade” it to a mere server.
>> I googled that little guy and that is a pretty neat little machine. 
>> Basically it is a tiny puter but really tiny, just not tiny on
>> features.  The Zotac systems, even some older ones, are pretty nifty.  I
>> think I read they have a ITX mobo which is really compact.
> ITX (or rather miniITX) is 17×17 cm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX
> Those NUC-types are much smaller. I don’t quite know whether that board form
> factor has a name of its own (aside from NUC, but that’s a marketing name
> from Intel).
>
>> It sort of reminds me of a cell phone.  Small but fast CPUs, some even
>> have decent amounts of ram so they can handle quite a lot.  Never heard of
>> this thing before.  I wouldn't mind having one of those to work as my
>> OpenVPN server thingy.  I'd just need to find one that has 2 ethernet
>> ports and designed for that sort of task. 
> Many of the ZBoxes have dual NICs, which is what makes them very popular
> among server and firewall hackers because they are also very frugal. My
> particular model is the CI331:
> https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-ci331-nano-barebone
> It has one 2,5″ slot and one undocumented SATA M.2 which can only be reached
> by breaking the warranty seal. That’s where zotac installs a drive if you
> buy a zbox with Winblows pre-installed.
>
> After updating the BIOS, which allowed the CPU to enter lower C states, it
> draws 6 W on idle. It’s not a record, but still not so much for a 24/7 x86
> system.

I was looking for one with two ethernet ports but wasn't having any luck
yet.  I did find and download like a catalog thing but it will take a
while to dig through it.  They have a lot of models for different
purposes.  I did see a pre-made thing on ebay but can't recall the brand
that cost hundreds that was made just for VPNs and such.  It was really
pricey tho.  But, you plug it in, boot it up and it had evrything
installed and then some to control networks traffic.  It had stuff I
never heard of. 

I notice that several are made for home theater devices.  That's pretty
neat too. 


>>>> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something
>>>> and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform
>>>> well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.
>>> An Intel Celeron from the Haswell generation (i.e. 8+ years old) did not
>>> have AES-NI yet, and it reached around 160 MB/s encryption speed. I tried
>>> it, because I had dealings with those processors in the past before I built
>>> my own NAS. Your old tech may still be usable, but please also consider
>>> power cost and its impact on the environment if it runs 24/7.
>> I'm not real sure what that old machine has.  I have Linux, can't recall
>> the distro tho, on it.  Is there a way to find out if it supports the
>> needed things?
> cat /proc/cpuinfo and look for aes or the like. Or enter the processor name
> into wikipedia, which will redirect you to the “List of processors by
> <Manufacturer>” with huge tables of comparision and general info on an
> architecture’s improvements over its predecessor, like AES.

I have booted that old thing up and I grepped cpuinfo and no AES that I
could see or grep could find.  Must be before it's time. 

While I had it booted up, I checked into what all it did have.  It only
has 4 SATA ports, one already used for the OS hard drive.  I could
likely run it from a USB stick which would make all 4 available.  It has
8GBs of memory too.  CPU is a AMD Phenom 9750 Quad running at 2.4GHz.  I
found it add that cpuinfo showed a different speed I think.  I'll check
it again later. Maybe I misread it.  It's not a speedster or anything
but I may can do something with it.  It also has two old PCI slots and
one that I'm pretty sure is a PCIex16 for like a video card but it has a
built in one already.  To add more SATA ports, I'd have to use the
faster slot really made for video cards.  Guess it would work but. 
Also, it only has a 100MB ethernet port.  Fairly slow but I'm not going
to expect a lot of hard drive speed either. 


>>>> I may use actual NAS software too.
>>> What is “actual NAS software”? Do you mean a NAS distribution? From my
>>> understanding, those distros install the usual services (samba, ftp, etc.)
>>> and develop a nice web frontend for it. But since those are web
>>> applications, there isn’t much to be gained from march=native.
>> I've seen TrueNAS, OpenNas I think and others.  Plus some just use
>> Ubuntu or something.  Honestly, almost any linux distro with no or a
>> minimal GUI would work. 
> OK, but then you don’t run those on Gentoo. And those NAS distros are so
> small and light-weight, they can be run from a USB stick if you so choose.
> My NAS’s mainboard has a USB-A socket on-board for that reason.

I downloaded several but plan to look at FreeNAS first.  Just see what
it looks like.  Pretty sure it is BSD based. 


>>>>   I'm sure Gentoo would work to with proper tweaking but then I need to
>>>> deal with compiling things.  Of course, no libreoffice or anything big so
>>>> it may not be to bad.  Thing is, the NAS software will likely be more
>>>> efficient since it is designed for the purpose. 
>>> More efficient than what?

Bigger system with lots of software running and using even more power,
some of which may not even be needed. 


>> I figure something like OpenNAS or TrueNAS would work better as it is
>> built to be user friendly and has tools by default to manage things. 
> Yeah, I was thinking of using one of those, too. But I liked the idea of
> being more flexible with some ZFS voodoo which the web interfaces won’t
> allow. Like creating a downgraded pool because I don’t have enough HDDs, filling
> that up and adding the missing disk later. Sometimes I wish for the bigger
> ease of use of a web interface.
>
>> I'm pretty sure they support RAID and such by default.  It is likely set
>> up to make setting it up easier too. 
> They do, naturally. And yes, the frontends hide lots of the gory details.
>


That's my thinking since RAID, ZFS and such are new to me.  Of course,
front ends do take away a lot of fine controls too, usually. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 7908 bytes --]

Am Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 04:28:55PM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> >> It sort of reminds me of a cell phone.  Small but fast CPUs, some even
> >> have decent amounts of ram so they can handle quite a lot.  Never heard of
> >> this thing before.  I wouldn't mind having one of those to work as my
> >> OpenVPN server thingy.  I'd just need to find one that has 2 ethernet
> >> ports and designed for that sort of task. 
> > Many of the ZBoxes have dual NICs, which is what makes them very popular
> > among server and firewall hackers because they are also very frugal. My
> > particular model is the CI331:
> > https://www.zotac.com/us/product/mini_pcs/zbox-ci331-nano-barebone
> > It has one 2,5″ slot and one undocumented SATA M.2 which can only be reached
> > by breaking the warranty seal. That’s where zotac installs a drive if you
> > buy a zbox with Winblows pre-installed.
> >
> > After updating the BIOS, which allowed the CPU to enter lower C states, it
> > draws 6 W on idle. It’s not a record, but still not so much for a 24/7 x86
> > system.
>
> I was looking for one with two ethernet ports but wasn't having any luck
> yet.  I did find and download like a catalog thing but it will take a
> while to dig through it.  They have a lot of models for different
> purposes.

Here’s a list of barebone systems with dual-nics:
https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=barepc&xf=19071_2
You can narrow down your criteria in much detail, such as passively cooled¹,
CPU vendor and features (hello, AES) or even if it’s officially suited for
conutinuous operation by the manufacturer. Obviously, mini barebones are not
suited for big NAS duty due to their form factor.

I mentioned this site before. But even though it’s EU centric, many products
are available worldwide (or in regional variants). Others on the list chimed
in and named more sites, but I can’t remember them.

> I did see a pre-made thing on ebay but can't recall the brand that cost
> hundreds that was made just for VPNs and such.

VPN appliances are pricey due to their industrial design. But for a normal
dude like we are, a consumer-grade device might be better suited. Especially
if it can be used for other purposes such as media source for the TV.

> It was really pricey tho.  But, you plug it in, boot it up and it had
> evrything installed and then some to control networks traffic.  It had
> stuff I never heard of. 

Industrial stuff, as I said. And you pay for the bespoke software, without
which the appliance probably won’t work.

> >>>> I have a old computer that I might could use.  It is 4 core something
> >>>> and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out.  I think it will perform
> >>>> well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it.
> >> I'm not real sure what that old machine has.  I have Linux, can't recall
> >> the distro tho, on it.  Is there a way to find out if it supports the
> >> needed things?
> > cat /proc/cpuinfo and look for aes or the like.

> I have booted that old thing up and I grepped cpuinfo and no AES that I
> could see or grep could find.  Must be before it's time. 
>
> While I had it booted up, I checked into what all it did have.  It only
> has 4 SATA ports, one already used for the OS hard drive.  I could
> likely run it from a USB stick which would make all 4 available.  It has
> 8GBs of memory too.  CPU is a AMD Phenom 9750 Quad running at 2.4GHz.  I
> found it add that cpuinfo showed a different speed I think.

cpuinfo shows the current frequency, not the maximum.

> It's not a speedster or anything but I may can do something with it.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Phenom_processors the
9750 Quad is a 95 W or 125 W processor. Going by
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Phenom+9750+Quad-Core&id=306
its single-thread power is ca. ⅔ that of the Celeron N5100 on my ZBox (at 6 W):
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+N5100+%40+1.10GHz&id=4331

> >> I'm pretty sure they support RAID and such by default.  It is likely set
> >> up to make setting it up easier too. 
> > They do, naturally. And yes, the frontends hide lots of the gory details.
>
> That's my thinking since RAID, ZFS and such are new to me.  Of course,
> front ends do take away a lot of fine controls too, usually. 

Setting up ZFS is—from a technical POV—not that much different from LVM,
which you are familiar with. You have block devices over which you create a
virtual device (vdev). A vdev can be a single disk, or a mirror of disks, or
a parity RAID. A storage pool is then created over one or more vdevs. And in
that pool you can create several ZFS (or just the one that is created with
the pool itself).

┌POOL───────────────────────────┐
│┌VDEV 1────┐┌─VDEV 2────────┐ ┌┴ZFS────┐
││  mirror  ││  parity RAID  │ │  /pool │
││┌───┐┌───┐││┌───┐┌───┐┌───┐│ ├─ZFS────┴─────┐
│││sda││sdb││││sdc││sdd││sde││ │  /pool/video │
││└───┘└───┘││└───┘└───┘└───┘│ └┬─────────────┘
│└──────────┘└───────────────┘  │
└───────────────────────────────┘

In comparison:
LVM: block device/partition → physical volume → volume group → logical volume → any file system
ZFS: block device/partition                   → vdev         → pool           → ZFS filesystem

The beauty is that ZFS can take care of everything. You just give it whole
block devices and at the other end you get a mountable file system. What you
also get is protection from bitrot thanks to in-FS checksumming. You don’t
get that with rsync on ext4. That’s why eventually I decided for ZFS for my
NAS over other, perhaps more practical solutions like LVM on mdraid. When it
checks the pool’s integrity, it is faster than mdraid, because it knows
where actual data is stored, so it can skip empty parts.

The biggest disadvantage over LVM is that it’s rather limited regarding
adding or removing disks. You cannot simply add a disk to a parity VDEV,
only to a mirror (which only increases redundancy, not capacity). And once a
new vdev is added to a pool, you cannot remove it, only replace its disks.
People added a single disk to a pool by accident and had to rebuild the
entire thing as a result. (Though I think that particular problem has been
dealt with recently.)

There exist of course some technical pitfalls. The ashift parameter
determines how big the smallest block of data is and should not be smaller
than the HDD’s block size. Hence, ashift=12 (2^12=4096) is the minimum one
should use these days. But I think it’s become the default anyways. Another
is the record size, which is the logical data block size for striping, IIRC.
For bigger files like video, it’s more efficient to use a bigger block size
(say, 1 MiB) than a smaller like 64 k, because it improves the ratio of
metadata over payload.


¹ Regarding passive cooling: I like it, because fans break and make noise.
But running Gentoo on a tiny box with a small heatsink may put too much
stress on the electronics. When I tested out the performance of the ZBox, I
played Warzone 2100—a 3D realtime strategy game—on it on my 2560×1440 screen
(fluently, I might add). But afterwards the whole case was HOT.

-- 
Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

Save water! Dilute it!

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Wols Lists]

On 25/08/2022 19:59, Dale wrote:
> While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
> having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
> them correctly on the new system?  I may try to build a small computer
> for a NAS soon.  I'm not sure what is the least I can buy that will
> perform well.  I need to look into small mobos to see what options I
> have.  I mostly need a CPU to handle moving files, memory to pass it
> through and lots of SATA ports.  I figure a fast card for most SATA ports.

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid

That might be a good read ... I know I push it a bit, but it does go 
into disk management a decent bit.

If you can think of any improvements, they'll be welcome! :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Wols Lists wrote:
> On 25/08/2022 19:59, Dale wrote:
>> While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
>> having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
>> them correctly on the new system?  I may try to build a small computer
>> for a NAS soon.  I'm not sure what is the least I can buy that will
>> perform well.  I need to look into small mobos to see what options I
>> have.  I mostly need a CPU to handle moving files, memory to pass it
>> through and lots of SATA ports.  I figure a fast card for most SATA
>> ports.
>
> https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid
>
> That might be a good read ... I know I push it a bit, but it does go
> into disk management a decent bit.
>
> If you can think of any improvements, they'll be welcome! :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Wol
>
>

It seems I've been to that link before, may even have it bookmarked,
somewhere.  I'll give it another read tho.  After all, it has to be good
or you wouldn't share it.  ;-) 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Wols Lists]

On 26/08/2022 00:56, Dale wrote:
> Wols Lists wrote:
>> On 25/08/2022 19:59, Dale wrote:
>>> While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
>>> having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
>>> them correctly on the new system?  I may try to build a small computer
>>> for a NAS soon.  I'm not sure what is the least I can buy that will
>>> perform well.  I need to look into small mobos to see what options I
>>> have.  I mostly need a CPU to handle moving files, memory to pass it
>>> through and lots of SATA ports.  I figure a fast card for most SATA
>>> ports.
>>
>> https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid
>>
>> That might be a good read ... I know I push it a bit, but it does go
>> into disk management a decent bit.
>>
>> If you can think of any improvements, they'll be welcome! :-)
>>
> It seems I've been to that link before, may even have it bookmarked,
> somewhere.  I'll give it another read tho.  After all, it has to be good
> or you wouldn't share it.  ;-)
> 
I think it's saved a lot of bacon over the years :-) Even if I've mostly 
edited it. I haven't written much of it from scratch.

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Wols Lists wrote:
> On 26/08/2022 00:56, Dale wrote:
>> Wols Lists wrote:
>>> On 25/08/2022 19:59, Dale wrote:
>>>> While at it, can I move the drives on LVM to another system without
>>>> having to copy anything?  Just physically move the drives and LVM see
>>>> them correctly on the new system?  I may try to build a small computer
>>>> for a NAS soon.  I'm not sure what is the least I can buy that will
>>>> perform well.  I need to look into small mobos to see what options I
>>>> have.  I mostly need a CPU to handle moving files, memory to pass it
>>>> through and lots of SATA ports.  I figure a fast card for most SATA
>>>> ports.
>>>
>>> https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid
>>>
>>> That might be a good read ... I know I push it a bit, but it does go
>>> into disk management a decent bit.
>>>
>>> If you can think of any improvements, they'll be welcome! :-)
>>>
>> It seems I've been to that link before, may even have it bookmarked,
>> somewhere.  I'll give it another read tho.  After all, it has to be good
>> or you wouldn't share it.  ;-)
>>
> I think it's saved a lot of bacon over the years :-) Even if I've
> mostly edited it. I haven't written much of it from scratch.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol

I see typos.  Do they matter to you? 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Wols Lists]

On 26/08/2022 12:27, Dale wrote:
>> I think it's saved a lot of bacon over the years:-)  Even if I've
>> mostly edited it. I haven't written much of it from scratch.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Wol
> I see typos.  Do they matter to you?

Apart from the one intentional one, I'd like to fix any others :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[David Haller]

Hello,

On Thu, 25 Aug 2022, Dale wrote:
>Jack wrote:
[..]
>> Related question - how much space would you actually save by
>> decreasing the number of inodes by 90%?  Enough for one or two more
>> videos?
>
>Now I have to admit, that is a question I have too.

From my tests with a swapfile (which matches what I remember from real
FSen), I think '-T largefile' vs. default frees up around 1.6% of the
capacity, so for 9.1T it'd be around 150G which might be worthwhile
_iff_ you are sure about what kind of files will go on that FS.

FWIW, in a pinch if you run out of Inodes, you can create an image
file on that fs, taking just 1 Inode, format that image differently,
loop-mount it and put ton's of files inside the image. It'll eat a bit
of performance though.

And about the average filesize in a dir: Just find out the size (e.g.: 
     du -msx /foo
) and the number of used inodes (e.g.:
    find /foo -xdev | wc -l
[1]) and then just divide:
    summed_size_in_unit / number_of_files = avg_size_in_unit
for FSen, just divide used space by used inodes.

HTH,
-dnh

[1] assuming you have no files with '\n' in the filename

-- 
printk (KERN_ERR "%s: Oops - your private data area is hosed!\n", ...)
        linux-2.6.6/drivers/net/ewrk3.c

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Andreas Fink]

On Thu, 18 Aug 2022 13:04:57 -0500
Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

> Howdy,
> 
> I got my 10TB drive in today.  I want to maximize the amount of data I
> can put on this thing and it remain stable.  I know about -m 0 when
> making the file system but was wondering if there is any other tips or
> tricks to make the most of the drive space.  This is the output of cgdisk.
> 
> 
> Part. #     Size        Partition Type            Partition Name
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>             1007.0 KiB  free space
>    1        9.1 TiB     Linux filesystem          10Tb
>             1007.5 KiB  free space
> 
> 
> I'm not sure why there seems to be two alignment spots.  Is that
> normal?  Already, there is almost 1TB lost somewhere.  Any way to
> increase that and still be safe?  Right now, I've ran the short test and
> it is chewing on the long test.  It will be done around 7AM tomorrow, 19
> or 20 hours to complete.  As it is, there's no data on it or even a file
> system either.  Now is the time to tweak things. 
> 
> Any tips or ideas would be appreciated. 
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-) 
> 

Ah yes, the good old harddisk marketing size calculating in base 1000,
while TiB is in base 1024.
In short:
1TB=1000^4 != 1TiB=1024^4

Do the math yourself, what 10TB should be in TiB, but it's in the
ballpark of 9.1TiB ;)

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Howdy,

Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a drive
down a fair amount?  This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about
49.51MB/s or so.  I actually copied that from the progress of rsync and
a nice sized file.  It's been running over 24 hours now so I'd think
buffer and cache would be well done with.  LOL 

It did pass both a short and long self test.  I used cryptsetup -s 512
to encrypt with, nice password too.  My rig has a FX-8350 8 core running
at 4GHz CPU and 32GBs of memory.  The CPU is fairly busy.  A little more
than normal anyway.  Keep in mind, I have two encrypted drives connected
right now. 

Just curious if that speed is normal or not. 

Thoughts?

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  The pulled drive I bought had like 60 hours on it.  Dang near new. 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 3:15 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a drive
> down a fair amount?  This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about
> 49.51MB/s or so.

Encryption won't impact the write speeds themselves of course, but it
could introduce a CPU bottleneck.  If you don't have any cores pegged
at 100% though I'd say this isn't happening.  On x86 encrypting a hard
drive shouldn't be a problem. I have seen it become a bottleneck on
something like a Pi4 if the encryption isn't directly supported in
hardware by the CPU.

50MB/s is reasonable if you have an IOPS-limited workload.  It is of
course a bit low for something that is bandwidth-limited.  If you want
to test that I'm not sure rsync is a great way to go.  I'd pause that
(ctrl-z is fine), then verify that all disk IO goes to zero (might
take 30s to clear out the cache).  Then I'd use "time dd bs=1M
count=20000 if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/drive/test"  to measure how long
it takes to create a 20GB file.  Oh, this assumes you're not using a
filesystem that can detect all-zeros and compress or make the file
sparse.  If you get crazy-fast results then I'd do a test like copying
a single large file with cp and timing that.

Make sure your disk has no IO before testing.  If you have two
processes accessing at once then you're going to get a huge drop in
performance on a spinning disk.  That includes one writing process and
one reading one, unless the reads all hit the cache.

-- 
Rich

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 3:15 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a drive
>> down a fair amount?  This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about
>> 49.51MB/s or so.
> Encryption won't impact the write speeds themselves of course, but it
> could introduce a CPU bottleneck.  If you don't have any cores pegged
> at 100% though I'd say this isn't happening.  On x86 encrypting a hard
> drive shouldn't be a problem. I have seen it become a bottleneck on
> something like a Pi4 if the encryption isn't directly supported in
> hardware by the CPU.
>
> 50MB/s is reasonable if you have an IOPS-limited workload.  It is of
> course a bit low for something that is bandwidth-limited.  If you want
> to test that I'm not sure rsync is a great way to go.  I'd pause that
> (ctrl-z is fine), then verify that all disk IO goes to zero (might
> take 30s to clear out the cache).  Then I'd use "time dd bs=1M
> count=20000 if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/drive/test"  to measure how long
> it takes to create a 20GB file.  Oh, this assumes you're not using a
> filesystem that can detect all-zeros and compress or make the file
> sparse.  If you get crazy-fast results then I'd do a test like copying
> a single large file with cp and timing that.
>
> Make sure your disk has no IO before testing.  If you have two
> processes accessing at once then you're going to get a huge drop in
> performance on a spinning disk.  That includes one writing process and
> one reading one, unless the reads all hit the cache.
>

Kinda picking random reply. 

I finally got the full backups done and have updated a couple times, new
drive and old drives.  Someone mentioned atop and I gave it a try.  I
noticed the drive parts that is either being read from or written to
show up in red and a high amount of use.  After doing some google
searching, red means really, really busy.  Makes sense.  So, the drives
are apparently just maxing out. 

I also noticed something else.  Given that my internet is so much faster
now, that also puts a load on disk I/O.  Heck, the internet alone can
almost max out the drive I/O.  On top of that I'm watching a video on my
TV.  So, doing backups, watching TV and downloading stuff over a really
fast internet connection, no wonder things were a little slow. 

I also ran this on the new 10TB drive and a older SMR 8TB drive.  This
is about normal, ish.  sdl is the 8TB and sdm is the 10TB. 


root@fireball / # hdparm -tT /dev/sdl

/dev/sdl:
 Timing cached reads:   8814 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4410.88 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 558 MB in  3.00 seconds = 185.76 MB/sec
root@fireball / # hdparm -tT /dev/sdm

/dev/sdm:
 Timing cached reads:   8992 MB in  2.00 seconds = 4499.72 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 612 MB in  3.01 seconds = 203.47 MB/sec
root@fireball / #

I have some other drives that are slower and a couple that are faster. 
So, I guess it about averages out. 

I have another question.  I notice that the drive activity light stays
on a lot more, downloading/uploading faster etc etc.  Will that cause my
drives to age faster or is that designed in?  I try to get the higher
grade of drives, avoid those built for light duty stuff.  Of course,
they not designed to be used by NASA either.  :/

By the way, that new backup drive, filling up fast.  My storage
partition is too.  This fast internet is causing, issues.  ROFL  Time to
hunt up a deal on another 8TB or 10TB drive to add on.  Dang, my case is
about full.  I really need a NAS or something.  :-D

Dale

:-)  :-)

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Grant Taylor]

On 8/20/22 1:15 PM, Dale wrote:
> Howdy,

Hi,

> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a 
> drive down a fair amount?

m

> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.  I actually 
> copied that from the progress of rsync and a nice sized file. 
> It's been running over 24 hours now so I'd think buffer and cache 
> would be well done with.  LOL
> 
> It did pass both a short and long self test.  I used cryptsetup -s 
> 512 to encrypt with, nice password too.  My rig has a FX-8350 8 core 
> running at 4GHz CPU and 32GBs of memory.  The CPU is fairly busy. 
> A little more than normal anyway.  Keep in mind, I have two encrypted 
> drives connected right now.
> 
> Just curious if that speed is normal or not.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Dale
> 
> :-)  :-)
> 
> P. S.  The pulled drive I bought had like 60 hours on it.  Dang near 
> new.





-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Grant Taylor]

Sorry for the duplicate post.  I had an email client error that 
accidentally caused me to hit send on the window I was composing in.

On 8/20/22 1:15 PM, Dale wrote:
> Howdy,

Hi,

> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a 
> drive down a fair amount?

My experience has been the opposite.  I know that it's unintuitive that 
encryption would make things faster.  But my understanding is that it 
alters how data is read from / written to the disk such that it's done 
in more optimized batches and / or optimized caching.

This was so surprising that I decrypted a drive / re-encrypted a drive 
multiple times to compare things to come to the conclusion that 
encryption was noticeably better.

Plus, encryption has the advantage of destroying the key rendering the 
drive safe to use independent of the data that was on it.

N.B. The actual encryption key is encrypted with the passphrase.  The 
passphrase isn't the encryption key itself.

> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.

I wonder if you are possibly running into performance issues related to 
shingled drives.  Their raw capacity comes at a performance penalty.

> I actually copied that from the progress of rsync and a nice sized 
> file.  It's been running over 24 hours now so I'd think buffer and 
> cache would be well done with.  LOL

Ya, you have /probably/ exceeded the write back cache in the system's 
memory.

> It did pass both a short and long self test.  I used cryptsetup -s 512
> to encrypt with, nice password too.  My rig has a FX-8350 8 core running
> at 4GHz CPU and 32GBs of memory.  The CPU is fairly busy.  A little more
> than normal anyway.  Keep in mind, I have two encrypted drives connected
> right now.

The last time I looked at cryptsetup / LUKS, I found that there was a 
[kernel] process per encrypted block device.

A hack that I did while testing things was to slice up a drive into 
multiple partitions, encrypt each one, and then re-aggregate the LUKS 
devices as PVs in LVM.  This surprisingly was a worthwhile performance 
boost.

> Just curious if that speed is normal or not.

I suspect that your drive is FAR more the bottleneck than the encryption 
itself is.  There is a chance that the encryption's access pattern is 
exascerbating a drive performance issue.

> Thoughts?

Conceptually working in 512 B blocks on a drive that is natively 4 kB 
sectors.  Thus causing the drive to do lots of extra work to account for 
the other seven 512 B blocks in a 4 kB sector.

> P. S.  The pulled drive I bought had like 60 hours on it.  Dang near new.

:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Grant Taylor wrote:
> Sorry for the duplicate post.  I had an email client error that
> accidentally caused me to hit send on the window I was composing in.

I figured it was something like that.  ;-)

>
> On 8/20/22 1:15 PM, Dale wrote:
>> Howdy,
>
> Hi,
>
>> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a
>> drive down a fair amount?
>
> My experience has been the opposite.  I know that it's unintuitive
> that encryption would make things faster.  But my understanding is
> that it alters how data is read from / written to the disk such that
> it's done in more optimized batches and / or optimized caching.
>
> This was so surprising that I decrypted a drive / re-encrypted a drive
> multiple times to compare things to come to the conclusion that
> encryption was noticeably better.
>
> Plus, encryption has the advantage of destroying the key rendering the
> drive safe to use independent of the data that was on it.
>
> N.B. The actual encryption key is encrypted with the passphrase.  The
> passphrase isn't the encryption key itself.
>
>> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.
>
> I wonder if you are possibly running into performance issues related
> to shingled drives.  Their raw capacity comes at a performance penalty.

This drive is not supposed to be SMR.  It's a 10TB and according to a
site I looked on, none of them are SMR, yet.  I found another site that
said it was CMR.  So, pretty sure it isn't SMR.  Nothing is 100% tho.  I
might add, it's been at about that speed since I started the backup.  If
you have a better source of info, it's a WD model WD101EDBZ-11B1DA0 drive. 


>
>> I actually copied that from the progress of rsync and a nice sized
>> file.  It's been running over 24 hours now so I'd think buffer and
>> cache would be well done with.  LOL
>
> Ya, you have /probably/ exceeded the write back cache in the system's
> memory.
>
>> It did pass both a short and long self test.  I used cryptsetup -s 512
>> to encrypt with, nice password too.  My rig has a FX-8350 8 core running
>> at 4GHz CPU and 32GBs of memory.  The CPU is fairly busy.  A little more
>> than normal anyway.  Keep in mind, I have two encrypted drives connected
>> right now.
>
> The last time I looked at cryptsetup / LUKS, I found that there was a
> [kernel] process per encrypted block device.
>
> A hack that I did while testing things was to slice up a drive into
> multiple partitions, encrypt each one, and then re-aggregate the LUKS
> devices as PVs in LVM.  This surprisingly was a worthwhile performance
> boost.

I noticed there is a kcrypt something thread running, a few actually but
it's hard to keep up since I see it on gkrellm's top process list.  The
CPU is running at about 40% or so average but I do have mplayer, a
couple Firefox profiles, Seamonkey and other stuff running as well.  I
still got plenty of CPU pedal left if needed.  Having Ktorrent and
qbittorrent running together isn't helping.  Thinking of switching
torrent software.  Qbit does seem to use more memory tho. 


>
>> Just curious if that speed is normal or not.
>
> I suspect that your drive is FAR more the bottleneck than the
> encryption itself is.  There is a chance that the encryption's access
> pattern is exascerbating a drive performance issue.
>
>> Thoughts?
>
> Conceptually working in 512 B blocks on a drive that is natively 4 kB
> sectors.  Thus causing the drive to do lots of extra work to account
> for the other seven 512 B blocks in a 4 kB sector.

I think the 512 has something to do with key size or something.  Am I
wrong on that?  If I need to use 256 or something, I can.  My
understanding was that 512 was stronger than 256 as far as the
encryption goes. 


>
>> P. S.  The pulled drive I bought had like 60 hours on it.  Dang near
>> new.
>
> :-)

I'm going to try some tests Rich mentioned after it is done doing its
backup.  I don't want to stop it if I can avoid it.  It's about half way
through, give or take a little. 

Dale

:-)  :-)

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[William Kenworthy]

What are you measuring the speed with - hdparm or rsync or ?

hdparm is best for profiling just the harddisk (tallks to the interface 
and can bypass the cache depending on settings, rsync/cp/?? usually have 
the whole OS storage chain including encryption affecting throughput.  
Encryption itself can be highly variable depending on what you use and 
usually though not always includes compression before encryption.  There 
are tools you can use to isolate where the slowdown occurs.  atop is 
another one that may help.

[test using a USB3 shingled drive on a 32 it arm system]

xu4 ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
  Timing cached reads:   1596 MB in  2.00 seconds = 798.93 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads: 526 MB in  3.01 seconds = 174.99 MB/sec
xu4 ~ #

BillK

On 21/8/22 06:45, Dale wrote:
> Grant Taylor wrote:
>> Sorry for the duplicate post.  I had an email client error that
>> accidentally caused me to hit send on the window I was composing in.
> I figured it was something like that.  ;-)
>
>> On 8/20/22 1:15 PM, Dale wrote:
>>> Howdy,
>> Hi,
>>
>>> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a
>>> drive down a fair amount?
>> My experience has been the opposite.  I know that it's unintuitive
>> that encryption would make things faster.  But my understanding is
>> that it alters how data is read from / written to the disk such that
>> it's done in more optimized batches and / or optimized caching.
>>
>> This was so surprising that I decrypted a drive / re-encrypted a drive
>> multiple times to compare things to come to the conclusion that
>> encryption was noticeably better.
>>
>> Plus, encryption has the advantage of destroying the key rendering the
>> drive safe to use independent of the data that was on it.
>>
>> N.B. The actual encryption key is encrypted with the passphrase.  The
>> passphrase isn't the encryption key itself.
>>
>>> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.
>> I wonder if you are possibly running into performance issues related
>> to shingled drives.  Their raw capacity comes at a performance penalty.
> This drive is not supposed to be SMR.  It's a 10TB and according to a
> site I looked on, none of them are SMR, yet.  I found another site that
> said it was CMR.  So, pretty sure it isn't SMR.  Nothing is 100% tho.  I
> might add, it's been at about that speed since I started the backup.  If
> you have a better source of info, it's a WD model WD101EDBZ-11B1DA0 drive.
>
>
>>> I actually copied that from the progress of rsync and a nice sized
>>> file.  It's been running over 24 hours now so I'd think buffer and
>>> cache would be well done with.  LOL
>> Ya, you have /probably/ exceeded the write back cache in the system's
>> memory.
>>
>>> It did pass both a short and long self test.  I used cryptsetup -s 512
>>> to encrypt with, nice password too.  My rig has a FX-8350 8 core running
>>> at 4GHz CPU and 32GBs of memory.  The CPU is fairly busy.  A little more
>>> than normal anyway.  Keep in mind, I have two encrypted drives connected
>>> right now.
>> The last time I looked at cryptsetup / LUKS, I found that there was a
>> [kernel] process per encrypted block device.
>>
>> A hack that I did while testing things was to slice up a drive into
>> multiple partitions, encrypt each one, and then re-aggregate the LUKS
>> devices as PVs in LVM.  This surprisingly was a worthwhile performance
>> boost.
> I noticed there is a kcrypt something thread running, a few actually but
> it's hard to keep up since I see it on gkrellm's top process list.  The
> CPU is running at about 40% or so average but I do have mplayer, a
> couple Firefox profiles, Seamonkey and other stuff running as well.  I
> still got plenty of CPU pedal left if needed.  Having Ktorrent and
> qbittorrent running together isn't helping.  Thinking of switching
> torrent software.  Qbit does seem to use more memory tho.
>
>
>>> Just curious if that speed is normal or not.
>> I suspect that your drive is FAR more the bottleneck than the
>> encryption itself is.  There is a chance that the encryption's access
>> pattern is exascerbating a drive performance issue.
>>
>>> Thoughts?
>> Conceptually working in 512 B blocks on a drive that is natively 4 kB
>> sectors.  Thus causing the drive to do lots of extra work to account
>> for the other seven 512 B blocks in a 4 kB sector.
> I think the 512 has something to do with key size or something.  Am I
> wrong on that?  If I need to use 256 or something, I can.  My
> understanding was that 512 was stronger than 256 as far as the
> encryption goes.
>
>
>>> P. S.  The pulled drive I bought had like 60 hours on it.  Dang near
>>> new.
>> :-)
> I'm going to try some tests Rich mentioned after it is done doing its
> backup.  I don't want to stop it if I can avoid it.  It's about half way
> through, give or take a little.
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)
>

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Grant Taylor]

On 8/20/22 10:22 PM, William Kenworthy wrote:
> What are you measuring the speed with - hdparm or rsync or ?
> 
> hdparm is best for profiling just the harddisk (tallks to the interface 
> and can bypass the cache depending on settings, rsync/cp/?? usually have 
> the whole OS storage chain including encryption affecting throughput.

How you measure performance is a complicated thing.  There is the raw 
device speed verses the speed of the system under normal load while 
interacting with the drive.

At $WORK, we are more concerned about throughput of the drive in our day 
to day use case than drive's raw capacity.

> Encryption itself can be highly variable depending on what you use and 
> usually though not always includes compression before encryption.

Compression can be a very tricky thing.  There's the time to decompress 
and compress the data as it's read and written (respectively).  Then 
there's the throughput of data to the drive and through the drive to the 
media.  If you're dealing with text that can get a high compression 
ratio with little CPU overhead, then there's a good chance that you will 
get more data into / out of the drive faster if it's compressed than at 
the same bit speed decompressed.

To whit I enabled compression on my ZFS pools a long time ago and never 
looked back.

> There are tools you can use to isolate where the slowdown occurs. 
> atop is another one that may help.

Yep.

> [test using a USB3 shingled drive on a 32 it arm system]

Is that an Odroid XU4 system?  If so, why 32-bit vs 64-bit?  --  Or am I 
mistaken in thinking the Odroid XU4 is 64-bit?

> xu4 ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
> /dev/sda:
>   Timing cached reads:   1596 MB in  2.00 seconds = 798.93 MB/sec
>   Timing buffered disk reads: 526 MB in  3.01 seconds = 174.99 MB/sec
> xu4 ~ #

If that is an Odroid XU4, then I strongly suspect that /dev/sda is 
passing through a USB interface.  So ... I'd take those numbers with a 
grain of salt.  --  If the system is working for you, then by all means 
more power to you.

I found that my Odroid XU4 was /almost/ fast enough to be my daily 
driver.  But the fan would kick in for some things and I didn't care for 
the noise of the stock fan.  I've not yet compared contemporary 
Raspberry Pi 4 or other comparable systems.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[William Kenworthy]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1515 bytes --]


On 21/8/22 13:34, Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 8/20/22 10:22 PM, William Kenworthy wrote:
> ...

> If that is an Odroid XU4, then I strongly suspect that /dev/sda is 
> passing through a USB interface.  So ... I'd take those numbers with a 
> grain of salt.  --  If the system is working for you, then by all 
> means more power to you.
>
> I found that my Odroid XU4 was /almost/ fast enough to be my daily 
> driver.  But the fan would kick in for some things and I didn't care 
> for the noise of the stock fan.  I've not yet compared contemporary 
> Raspberry Pi 4 or other comparable systems.


Samsung Exynos 5422 is developed on the 28 nm technology node and 
architecture Cortex-A15 / Cortex-A7. Its base clock speed is 1.40 GHz, 
and maximum clock speed in turbo boost - 2.10 GHz. Samsung Exynos 5422 
contains 8 processing cores.

> Instruction set (ISA) 	ARMv7-A32 (32 bit)
> Architecture 	Cortex-A15 / Cortex-A7
>
>
> Yes, its an xu4 and as I mentioned, its a USB drive (seagate 4G backup 
> with an SMR inside) - works ok as a backup drive and the data transfer 
> is fast until you fill the cache - then its throughput is best 
> described as "miserable"!  The xu4 lists as 32bit and odroid supplies 
> a 32 bit kernel etc - I just used their config as a base when building 
> gentoo onto it - its my build (for 5 xu4 based HC2 systems) and hosts 
> the backup drive.  My attaching the hdparm run was an example of its 
> use, and that happened to be the terminal i was using at the time.

BillK


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Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

William Kenworthy wrote:
> What are you measuring the speed with - hdparm or rsync or ?
>
> hdparm is best for profiling just the harddisk (tallks to the
> interface and can bypass the cache depending on settings, rsync/cp/??
> usually have the whole OS storage chain including encryption affecting
> throughput.  Encryption itself can be highly variable depending on
> what you use and usually though not always includes compression before
> encryption.  There are tools you can use to isolate where the slowdown
> occurs.  atop is another one that may help.
>
> [test using a USB3 shingled drive on a 32 it arm system]
>
> xu4 ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
> /dev/sda:
>  Timing cached reads:   1596 MB in  2.00 seconds = 798.93 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads: 526 MB in  3.01 seconds = 174.99 MB/sec
> xu4 ~ #
>
> BillK
>

I copied that from a fair sized file in rsync's progress output.  I just
picked one that was the highest in the last several files that were on
the screen, without scrolling back.  No file system with compression
since compressing video files doesn't help much.  Just ext4 on encrypted
LVM on a single partition. 

I tell you tho, this new drive is filling up pretty darn fast.  I got to
build a NAS or something here.  Thing is, how to put it somewhere it is
protected and all.  A NAS won't exactly fit in my fire safe.  :/  Bigger
fire safe maybe????  o_O 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  Just made three more jars of pepper sauce.  Must have that to go
with peas and cornbread.  :-D 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

Dale wrote:
> William Kenworthy wrote:
>> What are you measuring the speed with - hdparm or rsync or ?
>>
>> hdparm is best for profiling just the harddisk (tallks to the
>> interface and can bypass the cache depending on settings, rsync/cp/??
>> usually have the whole OS storage chain including encryption affecting
>> throughput.  Encryption itself can be highly variable depending on
>> what you use and usually though not always includes compression before
>> encryption.  There are tools you can use to isolate where the slowdown
>> occurs.  atop is another one that may help.
>>
>> [test using a USB3 shingled drive on a 32 it arm system]
>>
>> xu4 ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
>> /dev/sda:
>>  Timing cached reads:   1596 MB in  2.00 seconds = 798.93 MB/sec
>>  Timing buffered disk reads: 526 MB in  3.01 seconds = 174.99 MB/sec
>> xu4 ~ #
>>
>> BillK
>>
> I copied that from a fair sized file in rsync's progress output.  I just
> picked one that was the highest in the last several files that were on
> the screen, without scrolling back.  No file system with compression
> since compressing video files doesn't help much.  Just ext4 on encrypted
> LVM on a single partition. 
>
> I tell you tho, this new drive is filling up pretty darn fast.  I got to
> build a NAS or something here.  Thing is, how to put it somewhere it is
> protected and all.  A NAS won't exactly fit in my fire safe.  :/  Bigger
> fire safe maybe????  o_O 
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-) 
>
>

Well, 2.5 days later, first backup done.  Then I had to restart to
update the changes made in the past couple days that rsync didn't
catch.  When that got done, I wanted to close the drive and unhook it
but I'm getting that 'device in use' message.  Well, after some digging,
I found that extlazyinit process running and if memory serves me, that
is the process that creates the file system in the background.  I ran
into that before.  I think it was copying the files as fast as it was
able to create the file system to put it on.  I'll know next time I do
backups.  If this thing ever lets me disconnect the drive.  Oh.

Filesystem                       Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/10tb           9.1T  7.5T  1.6T  83% /mnt/10tb

I don't see that lasting to long.  :/  Yup, gotta come up with a plan. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Grant Taylor]

On 8/20/22 4:45 PM, Dale wrote:
> I figured it was something like that.  ;-)

:-)

> This drive is not supposed to be SMR.  It's a 10TB and according to a 
> site I looked on, none of them are SMR, yet.  I found another site that 
> said it was CMR.  So, pretty sure it isn't SMR.  Nothing is 100% tho. 
> I might add, it's been at about that speed since I started the backup. 
> If you have a better source of info, it's a WD model WD101EDBZ-11B1DA0 
> drive.

I am so far from an authority and wouldn't know anything better than a 
web search for manufacturer's documents.

> I noticed there is a kcrypt something thread running, a few actually 
> but it's hard to keep up since I see it on gkrellm's top process list. 
> The CPU is running at about 40% or so average but I do have mplayer, 
> a couple Firefox profiles, Seamonkey and other stuff running as well. 
> I still got plenty of CPU pedal left if needed.  Having Ktorrent and 
> qbittorrent running together isn't helping.  Thinking of switching 
> torrent software.  Qbit does seem to use more memory tho.

Ya, the number of things hitting the drive will impact performance.  The 
type of requests will also impact things.  In my limited experience, 
lots of little requests seem to be harder for a drive than fewer but 
bigger requests.

> I think the 512 has something to do with key size or something. 
> Am I wrong on that?  If I need to use 256 or something, I can. 
> My understanding was that 512 was stronger than 256 as far as the 
> encryption goes.

Agreed.  At least that's the quick look at the cryptsetup man page on 
line showed me.  But I suspect the underlying concept may still stand, 
even if the particular parameter in your previous message is not related.

> I'm going to try some tests Rich mentioned after it is done doing 
> its backup.  I don't want to stop it if I can avoid it.  It's about 
> half way through, give or take a little.

:-)



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Frank Steinmetzger]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2009 bytes --]

Am Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 05:45:18PM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> >> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.

For a new 3.5″ drive, I find this quite slow, even for the slowest part near
the centre of the spindle. I tend to use hdparm for a quick info, but that’s
been mentioned in another reply already.

> > I wonder if you are possibly running into performance issues related
> > to shingled drives.  Their raw capacity comes at a performance penalty.
>
> This drive is not supposed to be SMR. […] If you have a better source of
> info, it's a WD model WD101EDBZ-11B1DA0 drive. 

That’s a WD Red Plus. WD introduced the Plus series after the SMR debacle do
differentiate between the „now normal“ WD Reds which can (or maybe always)
have SMR and the Plus, which are always CMR.

> > Conceptually working in 512 B blocks on a drive that is natively 4 kB
> > sectors.  Thus causing the drive to do lots of extra work to account
> > for the other seven 512 B blocks in a 4 kB sector.
> 
> I think the 512 has something to do with key size or something.  Am I
> wrong on that?  If I need to use 256 or something, I can.  My
> understanding was that 512 was stronger than 256 as far as the
> encryption goes. 

Yeah, we are talking about two different kinds of blocks. You have the disk
block size, the encryption block size and the file system block size. (I
call them all block size here, but they may have more appropriate names).

I think the most important thing is to have the FS block size match the
drive, because in the end, the FS is what sends writes out. The encryption
layer is transparent underneath, it simply transforms the bit values, but
not their location. Disclaimer: that is pure speculation on my part based on
common sense.

-- 
Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’
Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network.

“A Melmacian almost never goes back on his word sometimes.” – Alf

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Wol]

On 24/08/2022 23:39, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> That’s a WD Red Plus. WD introduced the Plus series after the SMR debacle do
> differentiate between the „now normal“ WD Reds which can (or maybe always)
> have SMR and the Plus, which are always CMR.

Yup. The new reds are always SMR, the Red Pluses are CMR.

Cheers,
Wol

RE: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Laurence Perkins]

Note that 60ish MB/sec is very reasonable for a rotational drive.  They *can* technically go faster, but only if you keep the workload almost entirely sequential.  Most filesystems require a fair amount of seeking to write metadata, which slows them down quite a bit.

If you're desperate for performance, you can do things like tell it to ignore write barriers and turn off various bits of flushing and increase the amount of allowed dirty write cache.  These can be good for a significant performance boost at the cost of almost certainly corrupting the filesystem if the system loses power or crashes.

LMP

-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net> 
Sent: Saturday, August 20, 2022 2:57 PM
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

Sorry for the duplicate post.  I had an email client error that accidentally caused me to hit send on the window I was composing in.

On 8/20/22 1:15 PM, Dale wrote:
> Howdy,

Hi,

> Related question.  Does encryption slow the read/write speeds of a 
> drive down a fair amount?

My experience has been the opposite.  I know that it's unintuitive that encryption would make things faster.  But my understanding is that it alters how data is read from / written to the disk such that it's done in more optimized batches and / or optimized caching.

This was so surprising that I decrypted a drive / re-encrypted a drive multiple times to compare things to come to the conclusion that encryption was noticeably better.

Plus, encryption has the advantage of destroying the key rendering the drive safe to use independent of the data that was on it.

N.B. The actual encryption key is encrypted with the passphrase.  The passphrase isn't the encryption key itself.

> This new 10TB drive is maxing out at about 49.51MB/s or so.

I wonder if you are possibly running into performance issues related to shingled drives.  Their raw capacity comes at a performance penalty.

> I actually copied that from the progress of rsync and a nice sized 
> file.  It's been running over 24 hours now so I'd think buffer and 
> cache would be well done with.  LOL

Ya, you have /probably/ exceeded the write back cache in the system's memory.

> It did pass both a short and long self test.  I used cryptsetup -s 512 
> to encrypt with, nice password too.  My rig has a FX-8350 8 core 
> running at 4GHz CPU and 32GBs of memory.  The CPU is fairly busy.  A 
> little more than normal anyway.  Keep in mind, I have two encrypted 
> drives connected right now.

The last time I looked at cryptsetup / LUKS, I found that there was a [kernel] process per encrypted block device.

A hack that I did while testing things was to slice up a drive into multiple partitions, encrypt each one, and then re-aggregate the LUKS devices as PVs in LVM.  This surprisingly was a worthwhile performance boost.

> Just curious if that speed is normal or not.

I suspect that your drive is FAR more the bottleneck than the encryption itself is.  There is a chance that the encryption's access pattern is exascerbating a drive performance issue.

> Thoughts?

Conceptually working in 512 B blocks on a drive that is natively 4 kB sectors.  Thus causing the drive to do lots of extra work to account for the other seven 512 B blocks in a 4 kB sector.

> P. S.  The pulled drive I bought had like 60 hours on it.  Dang near new.

:-)



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 10:50 AM Laurence Perkins <lperkins@openeye.net> wrote:
>
> Note that 60ish MB/sec is very reasonable for a rotational drive.  They *can* technically go faster, but only if you keep the workload almost entirely sequential.  Most filesystems require a fair amount of seeking to write metadata, which slows them down quite a bit.
>
> If you're desperate for performance, you can do things like tell it to ignore write barriers and turn off various bits of flushing and increase the amount of allowed dirty write cache.  These can be good for a significant performance boost at the cost of almost certainly corrupting the filesystem if the system loses power or crashes.
>

I've also found that on large drives the sequential write speed varies
based on position in the drive.  If I run something like badblocks on
a new hard drive I'll see it start out at something like 200MB/s, and
by the end it is around100MB/s.  Then at the start of the next pass it
will jump back up to 200MB/s.  This is just direct block-level
sequential writes so it is an ideal use case.

As you say, ANY seeking will dramatically reduce the throughput.  Time
spent seeking is time not spent writing.  There is no opportunity to
"catch up" as the drive's read/write bandwidth is basically just a
function of the recording density and rotational rate and number of
platters/etc being read in parallel.  If it is seeking it is a lost
opportunity to read/write.

-- 
Rich