[TriLUG] Disk drive recovery services

[Wes Garrison via TriLUG]

Joe,

It wasn't the fault of ZFS.  I was using the notorious Seagate ST3000DM001,
which is a consumer drive not meant for NAS (not meant for much of anything
really).

Out of the original 8, only 2 remain.  Worst failure rate I've ever seen.

I was using a ZFS Z2 array (which can support 2 simultaneous failures), and
had 3 simultaneous failures; the latter 2 occurring during re-silvering.
This is pretty common, apparently.  When you have a failure and start
hammering the drives to do a rebuild, you often have more failures.

Lessons learned:
1) Use NAS drives or Seagate Exos for RAID/ZFS arrays, not crappy consumer
drives.  If you buy WD, make sure you get CMR and don't get fleeced with
SMR drives.
2) use ZFS Z3 for better fault tolerance
3) have an actual backup if practicable.  This is hard when your array is
huge.  How do you back up an 18TB array when the largest available consumer
drive is 4TB?  With another 18TB array, of course!

-Wes


On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 4:18 PM Mauricio Tavares via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 4:15 PM Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG
> <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 22 Sep 2020, Wes Garrison via TriLUG wrote:
> >
> > > He was able to do head transplants on multiple drives that were part
> of a ZFS
> > > array and I was able to recover almost all of the data.
> >
> > I'm just starting out on zfs (at home) and I have little idea what
> horrible
> > things can happen to zfs or how I'm going to recover from them if they
> do. I
> > thought that no much could go wrong with zfs. So what happened to your
> zfs
> > array?
> >
>        To have truly horrible things  happen to your data you need a Drobo.
>
> > Joe
> >
> > --
> > Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> > jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
> > map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> > Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
> > --
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