2tb drives for mdadm or zfs raidz (software raid)

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Khyron320

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Aug 26, 2002
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im so confused on this 4k sector stuff.. does anybody have a working raid5 array with 2tb drives with either ZFS/Mdadm ?

I also keep hearing about green drives dropping from arrays when they go into powersave mode... im assuming the latest versions of mdadm/ZFS wouldnt do this. Can anybody with the knowhow help me out.

Googling for this is just a mess with 10,000 answers that all point in different directions.

Right now im looking at:
Samsungs HD204UI F4 2tb drives for this project because supposedly (Samsung implemented 4k emulation correctly and WD did not)
 
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Nothinman

Nothinman

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Sep 14, 2001
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ZFS and mdadm are different things, I don't think it would be very smart to use them together. Especially since mdadm is Linux-only AFAIK and the only ZFS support I know of for Linux is via FUSE which is pretty slow on top of ZFS' own slowness.
 
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Khyron320

Senior member
Aug 26, 2002
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www.khyrolabs.com
Nothinman said:
ZFS and mdadm are different things, I don't think it would be very smart to use them together. Especially since mdadm is Linux-only AFAIK and the only ZFS support I know of for Linux is via FUSE which is pretty slow on top of ZFS' own slowness.
Click to expand...

I phrased this poorly I meant zfs raidz or mdadm. Linux software raid in general.
 
joetekubi

joetekubi

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Nov 6, 2009
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I don't have any experience with ZFS, but many years with mdadm raid disks. If you do some googling, you will see many sad requests for help with broken Raid5 filesystems. I would strongly suggest you use Raid 1 only (disk mirroring) unless you have a robust backup process in place.
Oh, I had to do some work to get the WD green drives to work correctly with 4k sectors and not park every 15 seconds or so. Neither seemed to cause a problem with the Raid.
 
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Khyron320

Senior member
Aug 26, 2002
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Yes I know all about mdadm. I have run 3x500gb for a couple of years now. I even have a cron job to email me when a drive desyncs. Which has happened 8 or 9 times. I even had 2 out of 3 desync on me and was able to recover.

That's not the point of raid5 for me. The point is making a large fs so I can find all my stuff. I have rsync cronjobs for data I consider important and backuppc for home folders.

I want like a massive 8tb raid 5 array so that's 5 drives and ill prob buy a 6th as a hotspare.

My problem now is I'm hearing about the 4k issue and the green drive issue and some of these are currently unfixable. But it also seems some manufacturers don't even give new model numbers to 512 vs 4k drives..... they just toss it out there and expect it to work.

Of coarse WD has the solution for you! Buy the raid version of the drive for 2x the price.... ugh its enough to make you want to go set your lawn on fire and roll around in the ashes.
 
Nothinman

Nothinman

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Sep 14, 2001
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I thought most of the issues with drives "falling" out of arrays were using the onboard fake-RAID, not Linux software RAID. I know a few months back I bought a pair of random Seagate drives at BestBuy for RAID1 and haven't had any issues with them at all. They're not 4K drives though.
 
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