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

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 7:25 AM Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 10:09 AM Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.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.