sfoskett

OP here. Thanks for the comments and suggestions! I updated the post to include the full text of the email as well as a link to this discussion.

I wonder if anyone has any suggestions about what we can do to stop this kind of thing. Should we complain to someone or just warn people online? Is there anything that can be done to head off this kind of thing?

Great idea! I just updated the post with the entire text (unlinked)!

I'm glad to see so many folks listening/watching! The On-Premise IT Roundtable selects a controversial premise to discuss on each episode, and it appears that this was a good one!

If you'd like to join in a future discussion, I'd love to have you join us. I'm @SFoskett on Twitter.

Find me these “properly programmed devices”! This is the core of the issue: bad assumptions and poor QA let bugs like this have an outsized impact. It’s our fault, folks.

Thank you! I appreciate both tips!

There kinda isn't such a thing at this point. I sure wish there was! And this is the point behind the article: Wouldn't it be awesome if ZFS had continued developing as the super filesystem it looked like last decade? It would do all this and more! Frankly if ZFS supported re-balancing ("re-RAID-ing") and hybrid pools, it would be pretty much everything we all need. I do hope ZFS or Btrfs or something gets there.

I guess I'm an old storage guy. I call it the FAT on everything! :-)

...but ReFS File Integrity is disabled by default! Integrity streams are enabled for metadata only. Here's how to turn it on: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj218351%28v=wps...

I'm sorry, I was referring to hybrid storage as a technology category, not the hybrid disk drives like Seagate Momentus XT. You're right that a 2-drive hybrid (Fusion Drive) will mathematically be less reliable than a non-hybrid one and that those "hybrid disks" haven't lived up to the hype.

Pretty much every enterprise storage solution designed today is hybrid (SSD plus HDD) or all-flash and includes lots of advanced availability features.

I realize that not everyone lives in the world of enterprise storage, so I appreciate your question.

ZFS is a filesystem (and also kind of a volume manager) and is designed to be fairly versatile and to run alongside an OS and applications. ZFS includes some impressive features long found in enterprise arrays, including snapshots, mirroring, replication, RAID, and data protection.

Dedicated storage arrays have long supported many more specialized features, and I urge you to read up on cool products like Pure FlashArray, NetApp SolidFire, EMC Unity, EMC Isilon, HPE Nimble Storage, Tintri, etc. You'll see that most/all have awesome hybrid (flash/disk) capabilities, all-flash tuning, integration with VMware, Windows Server, and Docker, scale-out capability, etc.

It's a pretty amazing field, and that's why I've dedicated my professional career specializing in enterprise storage. Maybe a good place to start is the Storage Field Day video series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22Storage%20Fi...

I didn't even consider this. Thanks for the explanation! Makes tons of sense!

Incidentally, many modern filesystems (including NTFS) store very small files in the FAT rather than taking up a whole block for this very reason!

Yeah, as mentioned in the post, you can indeed just add a vdev to the pool whenever you want. But the risk, apart from performance, is data protection If you add one disk, your whole pool is at risk. So of course you have to add two or more disks as a mirror or RAIDZ but lots of home users don't want to do this. They want that Drobo thing where they throw another log on the fire and everything gets rebalanced. It's sad that ZFS can't do this, and that it can't "upgrade" RAID-Z1 to RAID-Z2. It's hard to do, but would be so much nicer.

Hybrid storage combines flash and disk for better performance and lower cost. Most hybrid storage is tiered, meaning that data can "live" on either flash or disk, but there are other approaches that look a lot more like a cache (see Nimble Storage, for example). True hybrid storage would work like Apple Fusion Drive or Hybrid Storage Spaces Direct - A single pool with SSD and HDD where data can reside wherever is best.

L2ARC is only ever a cache and although it can be on SSD, ZFS generally won't use much more than a few tens of GB. ZIL isn't even a cache and is only used for synchronous writes. Check any ZFS tuning guide and the gist will be "just buy more RAM or create an all-SSD pool" rather than trying to wedge an SSD into L2ARC or ZIL.

Enterprise Storage == Real Storage Arrays

Basically every storage array is years beyond ZFS in terms of features and capabilities. Even the ones based on ZFS! And I don't think anyone would argue that. After all, Dell EMC, HPE, Pure Storage, HDS, etc spend many millions a year developing advanced storage technologies.

Yup. This. Now that I have 32 GB of RAM in my FreeNAS box I decided I really didn't need dedupe after all. I just don't have that much duplicated data, and I've got 60 TB of HDDs in the box. So I use the RAM for VMs instead!

I had never heard of bcachefs. Thanks for the pointer!

It's in there.

...and most of which won't work with a given display. SO you have to figure out which of the dozen or so possibilities works with your monitor and computer and buy the right cable to go between them.

I agree that it's exciting to have a durable/flippable cable that can be used for all sorts of things. The issue is that the nomenclature is unclear, with everyone just saying "USB-C" when that can mean all sorts of things.

I actually spent quite a lot of time talking about "Alternate Mode", I just didn't call it that all the way through.

No you can damage your devices with C-to-C cables. https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BensonLeung/posts/HakwCMmd346

You could try them with appropriate peripherals and see if they connect at max throughput... But that's going to be very hard since there are pretty much no Thunderbolt 3 peripherals out there.

Well they did change the encoding of USB 3.0 to become USB 3.1 gen 1. But that's about it. And it's backward-compatible so it doesn't matter.

Having the higher data rate be "same name gen 2" is beyond dumb.

Plus, as noted by lee_s2, the higher-cost/higher-protocol cables are "active" with chips in them.

"Alternate Mode" means "use these same pins for something other than USB". So Thunderbolt 3 uses the same connector but re-purposes the pins and wires to carry 2 or 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes rather than USB. HDMI similarly repurposes these pins to carry traditional HDMI signals.

Anyone implementing Thunderbolt 3 will also be implementing the full USB 3.1 stack in the same chipset. Intel, for example. It would be silly to implement just Alternate Mode Thunderbolt and skip the USB 3.1. That's all I meant.

Fantastic explanation. Right on!

"Everything fits but nothing works" - I love that!

The cables are generally backwards-compatible, but most people will buy the cheaper cables. And those won't work.

"Alternate Mode" means "using the same USB Type-C pins for other protocols". That protocol can be HDMI or DisplayPort or Thunderbolt or even analog audio!

The USB consortium specifies using HDMI 1.4b and DisplayPort 1.3 (and MHL 3.0) on the Type-C port. So non-Thunderbolt machines have these specs as a maximum.

Thunderbolt 3 can also pass video signals, and Intel specifies different versions of the protocols: HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2. Again, these are the maximums.

So if you have a USB Type-C monitor (not Thunderbolt) or a native USB Type-C to video cable, you're limited to HDMI 1.4b (1x4K at 30 Hz) but instead you might be able to use DisplayPort 1.3 (1x 4K at 120 Hz). If your video card, connector, cable, and display supports it, of course.

If you have a Thunderbolt-native monitor, you might be able to do 2x DisplayPort 1.2 (4K at 75 Hz or 5K at 30 Hz) or 2x HDMI 2.0 (4K at 60 Hz and much more). If your video card, cable, and the Thunderbolt controller support it.

Essentially, you can pass video directly over the port (in USB Alternate Mode) or over Thunderbolt. Then there are external video adapters that use USB or Thunderbolt data. But that's not in scope of your question.

I activated W3TC and CloudFlare so it should be working now

Crap. I missed that. You're right.