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[Mercutio]

That's unfortunate for them. Have you used or compared them to the truenas hardware appliances?

There's no comparison. Drobos are slow, especially if you're using them in their special RAID mode. Almost any other way someone could get a RAID5-like setup will get something that reads and writes faster. The special sauce they add is that users can supposedly mix and match drives of different sizes and still get a stripe set with parity somehow, but I've never tried that. What I have been willing to do is slide spare drives from my spare stack into one large temporary volume to use while I'm moving data around. This has come in handy a few times since I no longer have a bunch of desktops sitting around to shove drives into.

 

[Handruin]

That sounds very similar to the way unRAID tries to make it easier to just add in hdds without planning but still offers parity protection. I tried it for a bit during their demo but it didn't work well for me.

Tangentially related to HDDs, I'm seeing those Seagate earning reports in the news that storage demand is down. I'm hoping it might translate into sales or lower HDD prices for my upcoming upgrade.

 

[Mercutio]

$150 is more or less my sweet spot for drive purchases. I've seen 14TB SAS system pulls for not much more than that, so we're getting there.

 

[LunarMist]

Drobo filed for Chapter 11 this week. I have some Drobo hardware and it's been fine-ish. No complaints in particular but I've always liked Synology better for all the same stuff.

They have a bad reputation for lack of service and most of the market was quite low end, e.g., the type of people that used mismatched size/speed non-raid drives. Today those types are typically using dual drive RAID 1 upright book style devices with 2x16TB drives or something like that. Then they use the clouds for backups.

 

[Mercutio]

Drobo devices are slow but some of the storage setups I've seen from content creator types really make me shake my head.

 

[LunarMist]

Back in the '10s many photographers used the Drobo USB DAS units. Now the MACs are using 2-4 external NVMe in RAID 0 connected with TB.
It's just normal for them to have for example 4x4TB SSD in software RAID 0 containing all their data. Apparently a NAS is too archaic and clashes with the MAC user's decor.

 

[Mercutio]

An acquaintance of mine has one of the 500 most popular accounts on Onlyfans. She's making low seven figures per year from adult modeling. The library of work she's done in the last three year is actually her personal fortune.

I got involved in her operation because she was doing all her editing work on one of the old Xeon-based Mac Pros. She knew it had an SSD (good on her for knowing that) and two drives that she THOUGHT were backing each other up. She had a WD MyCloud drive sitting over on the corner of her desk, but it had filled up and she'd never bothered to replace or upgrade it.

Her Mac Pro died. She didn't know what happened and it was during lock down and it was an emergency. Didn't want to take it to Apple because of what she was using it for.

Turned out the Mac had just died. Needed a new logic board. But the two hard drives she had, the only place she was keeping 6.somethingTB of Sony Raw files and all the edits (less the random stuff she was posting or that made to iCloud from her laptop), was two ~10 year old drives in RAID0. I had to sit and draw on a whiteboard to explain that RAID doesn't mean backup and RAID0 specifically means the opposite of backup.

I wound up setting up a pair of 36TB FreeNAS systems that run syncthing between them; one with her and the other at her shooting space, and having both of them set up to send data to BackBlaze. That's also how I got involved in helping people with their lockdown careers in internet modeling.

 

[Handruin]

That's a good crossover use of IT skills and photography to help others in the OF world.

 

[Mercutio]

It's exactly the thing LM was describing and actually almost exactly the reasoning as well. New Apple stuff in particular just doesn't consider storage at all.

I set up a NextCloud system and run that for people I know just to give them a place to dump their "work" photos. Turns out not many people have a good handle on what photos are where in their life, especially for people who hop between phone ecosystems and may not have an actual personal computer in their lives.

 

[Handruin]

I've gravitated to recommending BackBlaze subscriptions for similar reasons. It's pretty good at finding all the photos, etc and simplified enough for those who aren't as tech savvy.

 

[Mercutio]

I did a fun little experiment with my students today. We set up a small RAIDZ1 on a Linux system using 3x2TB drives, copied some data to it and then installed OpenZFS on Windows, plugged in our drives and imported the existing zpool. It's not perfect, because it mounted read-only, but we're also talking about mounting a non-native filesystem on Windows. Those are usually read-only anyway. I keep forgetting that OpenZFS on Windows even exists, but now I kind of want to play with it more.

 

[Handruin]

That's actually really neat I wasn't aware OpenZFS would work on Windows even in read-only mode.

 

[LunarMist]

I tried some of the WD DC drives and they are so must quieter than the Seagate Exnos, that it is not even funny!

 

[Handruin]

Which size/model did you end up trying?

 

[LunarMist]

Just the 18TB H550 something. I guess the WD Gold are no longer made. They sound like the old Seagate Enterprise 10TB, not the nasty 18TB Seagates.

How does performance work in Raid 6? If there are 6 total drives for example, is the theoretical maximum R/W MB/sec. based on the 6 drives or 4 drives?

 

[Mercutio]

How does performance work in Raid 6? If there are 6 total drives for example, is the theoretical maximum R/W MB/sec. based on the 6 drives or 4 drives?

RAID6 is always kind of iffy and write speed depends a lot on implementation but in my experience with HDDs, it's usually about as fast as write speed of between one half and two drives for an array of five or six, depending on stripe sizes, caching strategy etc. That's generalizing across RAIDz2, Storage Spaces, LVM and fancier LSI HBAs. You don't pick RAID6 for speed.

 

[LunarMist]

I thought RIAD 6 pretty well replaced 5 in the last ten years due to the large sizes of the drives and the unrecoverable error rates.

[Q=1, T=1] Dikcmark of 64GB is 981.675 MB/s reads and 737.551 MB/s writes on the empty drives. It's 1214.602/1043.598 MB/s with the Q=8, T=1. Randomized 4K performance is the suck though. I have no idea who controls the stripers. How do I know in DSM6?

 

[Mercutio]

If you have software RAID, it should be a parameter you can set at creation of the array, but if you're seeing 700MB/sec sequential writes, you have NOTHING to complain about.

 

[LunarMist]

It is Synology, old software version DSM 6. They are on 7 for a year or two.

 

[Mercutio]

Synology just uses Linux LVM so if you're REALLY ambitious you might try creating your array with your drives attached to a Linux host and mdadm like the wind to set your chunk size to something bigger like 64 or 128k.

But honestly, you're getting 2x one HDD worth of write speed, and that's really damned good for mechanical drives in RAID6.

 

[ddrueding]

Also keep in mind that even though Synology does use Linux, it resets huge chunks of the OS on updates. I've just about given up using it in methods not supported by the factory web UI.

 

[LunarMist]

I did the last DSM6 update in 2022, but will not update it again unless there is some good reason.
I'm holding onto this old NAS for dear life, since the new ones require those ridiculous $650 for 18TB Syndology branded Toshiba drives.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm holding onto this old NAS for dear life, since the new ones require those ridiculous $650 for 18TB Syndology branded Toshiba drives.

I had not heard that, last time I messed with one it still took any drive I threw at it.

 

[LunarMist]

Do you have an XS/XS+ after generation 21? I'm pretty sure all of those are very aggresive about the drives. Thre older models like mine just give a single warning. The more consumerish models (mostly ARMans or Celerons) also don't care. I suppose legally they cannot cripple the older models too much the way they can with the new ones.

Are you using DSM 7 and if so is there any value to it (other than Linux security updates that I don't care about).