What do you think about buying second hand disks and using higher redundancy?
For example 4x 16TB in RAIDz2? Is anyone using something like that? How’s it performing, reliability-wise?
E: Thanks all for the opinions and information!
What do you think about buying second hand disks and using higher redundancy?
For example 4x 16TB in RAIDz2? Is anyone using something like that? How’s it performing, reliability-wise?
E: Thanks all for the opinions and information!
I got the same setup with eight 18TB Exos drives running in a RAIDz2 with an extra spare. Added to this though I got another vdev of eight 12 WD reds with another spare.
With this I can have 2 drives fail in a vdev at any point and still rebuild the pool. Though if more than 2 drives all fail at the same time the whole pool is gone.
But if that happens I have a second NAS offsite at my bro’s place that I backup specific datasets. This is connected with tailscale and a zfs replication task.
I dunno, like I said zfs is pretty damn good at recovery. If the drives simply drop out but there’s no hardware fault you should be able to clear the errors and bring the pool back up again. And the chances of two drives failing at the same time are pretty low. One of these days I do need to buy a spare to have on hand though. Maybe I’ll even swap out one drive just to see how long it takes to rebuild.