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A comment on Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due Soon, 40TB on Horizon. Parent comment

Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by matheusmoreira on Sunday June 11, 2023 @04:08AM (#36279306)
> As my NAS expands

How are you expanding capacity? With traditional software raid I'd need to fail every drive and replace them one by one with identical higher capacity drives which requires several rebuilds from parity which means a long time and massive I/O loads and high risk of unrecoverable read errors just destroying the whole array in the process. It's easier to make a new array and move data over...

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Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by KingMachiavelli on Sunday June 11, 2023 @04:36AM (#36279431)
I this it's just ZFS that has that "limitation", LVM and Btrfs just let you mix drives of arbitrary sizes.
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Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by matheusmoreira on Sunday June 11, 2023 @07:30AM (#36280352)
Everything raid has that limitation, including LVM, mdadm.

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Growing#Expanding_exi...

Btrfs has a more flexible block allocator but its parity implementation is still unreliable.

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Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by zorrotorro on Sunday June 11, 2023 @09:41AM (#36281269)
ZFS will also let you mix drives of different sizes. And the pool would grow as soon as you remove the smallest one.
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Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by magicalhippo on Sunday June 11, 2023 @06:56AM (#36280149)
Yes this is also a thing.

I used to do what you're doing. Last 6-7 years I've been running mirrored setup so I could expand by just adding a new vdev. Rebuilt it twice when I upgraded to significantly larger disks.

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Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by matheusmoreira on Sunday June 11, 2023 @07:31AM (#36280358)
What are you doing now? Surely there are better ways...
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Re:Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due... by magicalhippo on Sunday June 11, 2023 @07:50AM (#36280501)
Researching my options...

As I mentioned ZFS on top of LVM seems interesting in terms of features and flexibility. But reliability-wise... I'd like to run a more proper test setup to gain some experience before I'd trust it.

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