[ale] New hard drive procedure

Jim Kinney jkinney at jimkinney.us
Sun Jun 7 08:02:35 EDT 2015


There's a reason (several, actually) the default filesystem on RHEL and derivatives is now xfs. It has much of the happy stuff associated with zfs but none of the pain of half the RAM for filesystem. It scales larger than ext4 can (when are they going to fix that bug ?). It can handle multi-TB file sizes and not blink. And it's very mature. It plays very nicely with LVM. 

I've become rather fond of the RedHat way of /boot is a partition and all else is under LVM. Makes it possible and rather painless to adjust things around and needs change over the life of a machine. Need more swap? No problem. Need a new partition for a special use? No problem. Need a snapshot before a huge pile of weird changes? No problem.  

On June 7, 2015 4:45:02 AM EDT, DJ-Pfulio <djpfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote:
>Do you seriously suggest btrfs for normal people without a specific
>requirement?
>
>Just switched to ext4 last year, because I didn't want to be on the
>bleeding
>edge and wanted some real-world history behind the file system. Had jfs
>before
>that and never lost a bit.
>
>Btrfs will be ready around 2020, I think.
>
>Would use ZFS, if I had 16G of RAM to blow for storage. Alas, I do not.
>I
>consider it mature.
>
>Plus there are performance warnings about using btrfs with KVM.
>
>
>
>On 06/07/2015 04:32 AM, Michael Trausch wrote:
>> +1.
>> 
>> If you're running a system that "can't" go down under reasonably
>normal
>> circumstances, have at least two drives and use btrfs on them, set to
>an
>> appropriate redundancy mode. With weekly or monthly scrubs of the
>volume,
>> you'll get even earlier warning than SMART monitoring alone, plus
>your data
>> is recovered on the fly for errors that are spatially related.
>> 
>> I use a four disk setup (4x1TB) with btrfs in double redundancy mode.
>I've
>> had it catch some instances of silent corruption that wouldn't ever
>be caught
>> by anything other than probably ZFS, and automatically recover.
>That's a
>> winner for me. Plus it's insanely flexible, way more so than LVM2.
>Say
>> goodbye to backup, drive swap, restore and resize. Just swap and
>resize.
>> 
>> Note well: as with software raid, the processes for planned vs.
>emergency
>> drive replacement differ. In this case, planned is shrink, swap,
>grow,
>> rebalance. Emergency is of course swap, rebuild from redundancy. The
>former
>> is less time-intensive compared to the latter. When you've seen the
>first
>> scrub reporting recovery occurring on a disk due to media errors and
>not
>> silent corruption, it's time to replace that drive using the planned
>> procedure before you have to use the emergency one, when possible.
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>>> On Jun 6, 2015, at 8:10 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I do nothing more than install it and run it. I let my OS do the
>checking
>>> with smartctl.
>>> 
>>> I will do a quick check of the specs and compare to the manual or
>>> manufactures specs to make sure nothing obvious.
>>> 
>>> I've probably installed 3-4 hundred as singles and I don't _want_ to
>think
>>> how many as array units. I've never had a bad new drive out of the
>box.
>>> I've had a few, maybe 2 or 3 that failed within a couple of months
>and
>>> given the power supply died shortly after, I'm pretty sure it was
>killed
>>> the drives.
>>> 
>>> Most of the used drives I've installed have failed within a few
>months. All
>>> were over 5 years old when I got them.
>>> 
>>>> On Sat, 2015-06-06 at 19:59 -0400, Sam Rakowski wrote: Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I've purchased a new hard drive(magnetic) to replace an old one
>that has 
>>>> some bad sectors on it. I haven't ever bought a new hard drive;
>most of
>>>> my hard drives come used or part of a new device.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm just interested in hearing what you all run through when you
>receive
>>>> a new hard drive. Zero it? Run badblocks? All or none of the above?
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-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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