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

[Dale]

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


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

:-)  :-)