What do you think about buying second hand disks and using higher redundancy?

For example 4x 16TB in RAIDz2? Is anyone using something like that? How’s it performing, reliability-wise?

E: Thanks all for the opinions and information!

  • NarrativeBear@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    9 months ago

    I got the same setup with eight 18TB Exos drives running in a RAIDz2 with an extra spare. Added to this though I got another vdev of eight 12 WD reds with another spare.

    With this I can have 2 drives fail in a vdev at any point and still rebuild the pool. Though if more than 2 drives all fail at the same time the whole pool is gone.

    But if that happens I have a second NAS offsite at my bro’s place that I backup specific datasets. This is connected with tailscale and a zfs replication task.

    • Shdwdrgn
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      I dunno, like I said zfs is pretty damn good at recovery. If the drives simply drop out but there’s no hardware fault you should be able to clear the errors and bring the pool back up again. And the chances of two drives failing at the same time are pretty low. One of these days I do need to buy a spare to have on hand though. Maybe I’ll even swap out one drive just to see how long it takes to rebuild.

      • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        Do it. The last thing you need during a rebuild is the stress of not knowing how long / other issues with your specific setup.

        It’s only "disaster recovery* if you’ve never practiced… orherwise it’s just “recovery”