Disks

Experimenting with compression off

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Now that the new storage is in place, I thought to test with compression on and off. Perhaps also use both lz4 and zstd. For reference, this is one of a series of posts regarding compression testing on zpools: Experimenting with compression off – you are here Experimenting with compression=lz4 Experimenting with compression=zstd Compression results My plan: create three zpools of two mirrored devices and test. There will be three posts: compression off, […]

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Adding in new NVMe cards and sticks – and replacing two SSDs

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I notice I also worked with some SSDs at the end of this post – I have since amended the title of this post. In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 Today I removed two existing NVMe cards, each with a 1TB stick on it. Those sticks were added to these cards: If you want the same hardware, you can use these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. These are all

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Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool

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In recent posts: Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data If you have a look over those posts, you’ll see why you never want to downsize a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 removing the zfs labels from an drive which was part of a zpool which is no longer in use destroying the

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Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data

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As mentioned in Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD, I have a failing 5TB drive which is going to be replace by a 4TB drive. Only about 1.45TB are used, so there’s plenty of space to grow. If you get one thing from this post, don’t be downsizing zpools like this. I would have had much less work and opportunity for error, if I had returned that 4TB drive

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x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive

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I was up at 5:30 AM today. I packed the car and headed out. I arrived within the datacenter at about 8:15 or so. By 8:50, I was on IRC and the photos of the FreeBSD racks were uploading. Since I was going there anyway, I did some inventory and disposal work (a decommissioned server, about 25 old HDD, and various bits and pieces). I must say though, I’m not liking this option.

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Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD

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As foreshadowed in x8dtu – drive problems, I will be visiting a data center soon to replace a 4TB HDD. The replacement HDD arrived last night. It was unceremoniously tossed onto the front porch by the courier. However, it was properly packaged. I’m sure it’s fine. The original idea: put this drive into a host, and write some data to it, to exercise it a bit. As you will soon learn, that is

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Adding in a stand-by spare drive for ZFS on FreeBSD

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This is a follow up to Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD from two months ago. The replacement for the returned drive has arrived and after sitting for many weeks on my coffee table, it is installed in r730-03. Here it is, as found in /var/log/messages – this host is a Dell R730 which has drive cages allowing me to insert the drive without powering off the host. Jun 30 16:17:15

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Making sure I remove the correct drive

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Yesterday, I discovered I had removed the wrong drive from a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 Today, the zpool replace command has completed. Next, I carefully chose the right drive to pull from the drive bays. Status This is the zpool status, just before it completed: After it completed: I see gpt/SG_ZHZ16KEX is no longer in the zpool. Not trusting myself, I checked this way: [20:33 r730-03 dvl ~] % zpool status

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Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

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But first, there’s more Right after asking “Anyone running zfsd? Did you do anything in particular to configure it? I just added my first hot-spare to a zpool.”, ivy told me “noooooooo don’t use hot spares!! Keep a cold spare or at least an online device not attached to a pool. otherwise your zpool will randomly decide to attach its hot spare due to a temporary cabling issue or something like that. the

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