On 18/09/2023 11:13, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
With so many drives, you should also include a pricey power supply. And/or a
server board which supports staggered spin-up. Also, drives of the home NAS
category (and consumer drives anyways) are only certified for operation in
groups of up to 8-ish. Anything above and you sail in grey warranty waters.
Higher-tier drives are specced for the vibrations of so many drives (at
least I hope, because that’s what they™ tell us).
Have you seen the article where somebody tests that? And yes, it's true.
The more drives you have, the more you need damping. If all the drives
move their heads together, the harder it is for them to home in on the
correct track, to the point where you get the "perfect storm" of
vibration causing them all to reset, go back to park, try again, and
they are shaking so much none of them can find what they're looking for.
To be honest, I kinda like the Fractal Design Define 7
XL right now despite the higher cost. I could make a NAS/backup box
with it and I doubt I'd run out of drive space even if I started using
RAID and mirrored everything, at a minimum.
With 12 drives, I would go for parity RAID with two parity drives per six
drives, not for a mirror. That way you get 2/3 storage efficiency vs. 1/2
and more robustness; in parity, any two drives may fail, but in a cluster of
mirrors, only specific drives may fail (not two of the same mirror). If the
drives are huge, nine drives with three parity drives may be even better
(because rebuilds get scarier the bigger the drives get).
One of my projects in my copious (not) free time was to try and
implement raid-61. Like raid-10, you could spread it across any number
of drives (subject to a minimum). You could lose any 4 drives which
gives you a minimum of five (although with that few that would be the
equivalent of a five-times mirror).
Hey ho, I don't think that's going to happen now.
Cheers,
Wol
