Yeah but we’re talking 2.5 inch drives, and we’re talking about less than a terabyte of storage. There is no good reason to pick a physical drive HDD over an SSD when they’re practically the same price at that storage level. SSDs are simply safer to move, there are no moving parts, dropping an SSD isn’t that concerning, dropping an HDD can easily kill it. I mean think of this this way. There IS a physical reader that goes across the entire disk. That doesn’t exist in an SSD. It’s hard to do, but you can realistically take a hard drive and just SHAKE it to death with your hand, make the reader fall out of place. While shaking a solid state is more like just shaking a giant flash drive.
The sound is determined by what kind of drive it is. Consumer drives are for in-home use and are usually quiet. Enterprise drives are for dedicated server rooms or data centers and can get loud because it’s loud in there already.
I would recommend sticking with consumer level HDDs if this is a concern. The cost per TB isn’t as good.
I bought a 14 TB Seagate Exos and put it in a Fractal R5, which is a very good noise insulating case. I can hear clicking from anywhere on the same floor as that machine if I listen for it.
You could maybe pair two consumer drives together in JBOD to get the space you want, but that’s more expensive.
There’s no hard limit or standard, but I think 14 TB might be the largest you could find in a consumer HDD. The WD EasyStore goes on sale pretty often and sells for a good deal. Those should be quiet and already come in an external case. Look for reviews about it before buying.
Never ever going to buy Seagate again after the crap they’ve pulled on their Exos drives.
They simply decided to completely trash SMART and spin down commands. The drives simply won’t give you useful SMART data nor they won’t ever actually spin down, you can’t force it, the drive will report is as if it was spun down but in reality its still spinning.
My computer is a fanless Celeron in the living room and I can hear the HDD when I’m in the bed at 2am in the complete silence. If you’re concerned with noise you need to find another position, far from the bed
22.04 still isn’t FIPS validated yet, so if you need FIPS with Ubuntu pro, the most recent LTS distro you can get is 20.04. That’s why 20.04 is still popular.
Are you buying the hardware for this setup, or do you already have it laying around? If you don’t have the hardware yet I’d recommend not using external USB drives in any way possible, as speed and reliability will be hindered.
If you already have the hardware and want to use it I’m not super confident on recommending anything given my inexperience with this sort of setup, but I would probably try to use ZFS to minimize any potential read/write issues with dodgy USB connections. ZFS checksums files several times in transit, and will automatically repair and maintain them even if the drive gives you the wrong data. ZFS will probably be cranky when used with USB drives but it should still be possible. If you’re already planning on a RAID6 you could use a RAIDZ2 for a roughly equivalent ZFS option, or a double mirror layout for increased speed and IOPS. A RAIDZ2 is probably more resistant against disk failures since you can lose any 2 disks without pool failure, whereas with a double mirror the wrong 2 disks failing can cause a pool failure. The traditional gripe about RAIDZ’s longer rebuild times being vulnerable periods of failure are not relevant when your disks are only 2TB. Note you’ll likely want to limit ZFS’s ARC size if you’re pressed for memory on the Orange Pi, as it will try to use a lot of your memory to improve I/O efficiency by default. It should automatically release this memory if anything else needs it but it’s not always perfect.
Another option you may consider is SnapRAID+MergerFS, which can be built in a pseudo-RAID5 or RAID6 fashion with 1 or 2 parity drives, but parity calculation is not real time and you have to explicitly schedule parity syncs (aka if a data disk fails, anything changed before your last sync will be vulnerable). You can use any filesystems you want underneath this setup, so XFS/Ext4/BTRFS are all viable options. This sort of setup doesn’t have ZFS’s licensing baggage and might be easier to set up on an Orange Pi, depending on what distro you’re running. One small benefit of this setup is that you can pull the disks at any time and files will be intact (there is no striping). If a catastrophic pool failure happens, your remaining disks will still have readable data for the files that they are responsible for.
In terms of performance: ZFS double mirror > ZFS RAIDZ2 > SnapRAID+MergerFS (only runs at the speed of the disk that has the file).
In terms of stability: ZFS RAIDZ2 >= ZFS double mirror > SnapRAID+MergerFS (lacks obsessive checksumming and parity is not realtime).
If you want to be able to grow, check out mergerfs and snapraid. If you’re wanting to use a pi and USB drives it’s probably more what you’re wanting than zfs and raid arrays. It’s what i’m using and I’ve been really happy with it.
I’ve been using linux for a long time, and I have a background in this kind of stuff, but it’s not my career and I don’t keep as current as if it was, so i’m going to give my point of view on this.
A zfs array is probably the legit way to go. But there’s a huge caveat there. If you’re not working with this technology all the time, it’s really not more robust or reliable for you. If you have a failure in several years, you don’t want to rely on the fact that you set it up appropriately years ago, and you don’t want to have to relearn it all just to recover your data.
Mergerfs is basically just files on a bunch of disks. Each disk has the same directory structure and your files just exist in one of those directories on a single disk, and your mergerfs volume shows you all files on all disks in that directory. There are finer points of administration, but the bottom line is you don’t need to know a lot, or interact with mergerfs at all, to move all those files somewhere else. Just copy from each disk to a new drive and you have it all.
Snapraid is just a snapshot. You can use it to recover your data if a drive fails. The commands are pretty simple, and relearning that isn’t going to be too hard several years down the road.
The best way isn’t always the best if you know you’re not going to keep current with the technology.
Free egress is fine and all, but as someone who uses cloud storage as a last resort, I’d want to pay less for storing that data, regardless of what it costs to get it back.
A 20% increase is a little bonkers. Do they give any reasons for this substantial increase? Computer storage prices have not gone up, from what I can see (they’ve gone way down from two years ago).
Back blaze is one of the OG “cheap cloud” storage providers.
They buy cheap stuff and develop cheap storage networks to charge cheap prices and stay in business. They publish entire papers on running cheap storage if you’re interested. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff.
They raised prices 20% (or $1). Hardware costs **may have gone down that much, but I’m willing to bet their energy and rent prices haven’t. They’re subject to services inflation just as much as anybody else.
Frozen pizza prices in my area have increased more in the last year than their services.
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