Comment by 3JPLW | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3JPLW | Hacker News Reader

> Especially for home users and small businesses, RAID arrays are still a reliable and efficient way of storing a lot of data in a single place.

Is this really true? These are the sorts of situations where you don’t have a dedicated IT (or dedicated know-how) to avoid the sorts of “user” problems TFA assumes are at the root of many online problems.

I know I’ve always been terrified of rebuilding arrays after failures —- and it’s not just because of the remaining drives’ reliability. It’s because the tools I’ve used were really hard to use.

I should write a follow up article: you should test drive replacement / simulate failure before you start using storage.

This makes you comfortable using it and do things like drive replacements.

Products from Synology/QNAP or other brands have nice interfaces that will make things really easy for you.

Replacing the failed drive in my array was one simple command:

mdadm --add /dev/md6 /dev/sde

Then the rebuild started.

And similarly, in ZFS it'd be

  % zpool replace <pool> <bad-drive> <new-drive>

And you can also set up hot spares in both systems so that replacing the drive happens automatically.

One thing I would suggest is that you use /dev/disk/by-id when configuring mdadm or ZFS. Device renumbering over reboots under Linux isn't an issue for either system (they look at the metadata on disk rather than the drive name in /dev), but as an admin it helps to be able to type out the actual serial number on the drive when you're doing reboots (especially if you have the serial numbers written on the hotswap bays).

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