I have a ZFS RAIDZ2 array made of 6x 2TB disks with power on hours between 40,000 and 70,000. This is used just for data storage of photos and videos, not OS drives. Part of me is a bit concerned at those hours considering they’re a right old mix of desktop drives and old WD reds. I keep them on 24/7 so they’re not too stressed in terms of power cycles bit they have in the past been through a few RAID5 rebuilds.

Considering swapping to 2x ‘refurbed’ 12TB enterprise drives and running ZFS RAIDZ1. So even though they’d have a decent amount of hours on them, they’d be better quality drives and fewer disks means less change of any one failing (I have good backups).

The next time I have one of my current drives die I’m not feeling like staying with my current setup is worth it, so may as well change over now before it happens?

Also the 6x disks I have at the moment are really crammed in to my case in a hideous way, so from an aesthetic POV (not that I can actually seeing the solid case in a rack in the garage),it’ll be nicer.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago

    As someone who runs 3 large arrays with 8TB, 16TB, and 21TB drives respectively, know that:

    • RAIDZ1 will cause tons of fear when a disk fails if you’re used to Z2. Don’t change.
    • When a disk goes, the larger the disk, the slower the rebuild time, and the more taxing it is on the other disks. With Z1, if another fails during the rebiluild, you’re SOL.

    Less disks is simpler, but more disks is safer. 6 disks is the perfect sized array IMO. If you don’t need more space, I’d buy a 2TB hot spare and call it a day. But if space is a concern, Z2 with 4 disks.

    Edit: Those three arrays mirror each other in different locations, and the fear was still there when the Z1 had an issue. Mostly due to the headache, but still.

    • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.ukOPEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      The reason I went RAIDZ2 in my current setup was because of the number of disks increasing the chance of multi failures. But with fewer disks that goes down. I’m not at all worried about data loss, as I said I have good backups so I can always restore. So if the remaining disk dies during a rebuild, that’s unfortunate, but it only affects my uptime, not my data.