janusfox 🍅Oh right, world wide computer part shortage. All hard drives that will be produced in 2026 are already bought and paid for.
FML.
Okay, ended up with 3 16TB drives and 3 22TB drives. I couldn't get 6 of anything in any reasonable time frame or price.
It's going to be a heck of a progress to replace the 4xRAID5 and 2xRAID1 arrays.
I need to rebuild the RAID1 twice, then grow it to the new size. Then I'll have enough room to migrate the RAID5 data over to it. Then I'll just build a new 3xRAID5, move that data back. Add another drive to the RAID1 and make it a second 3xRAID5.
Should only take me 2.4 years.
Ylfingr, Devourer of Suns@janusfox I hope you're on btrfs or something and not ZFS. Heard ZFS really doesn't like mixed drive sizes (but we've never tried it, and even though we've dabbled in btrfs we've never done RAID).
@Ylfingr I have two different raid arrays, in fact.
@janusfox Fancy!
(we only have one bulk-storage disk in the first place)
dimmfox@Ylfingr @janusfox zfs handles it fine, it'll just be limited to the capacity of the smallest drive used (so if we got 1x 8TB and 3x 20TB then zfs will just use 8TB on all 4 disks in one 4 disk pool).
zfs does allow the gradual upgrades of disks and expansion of the pool. So in the above example if the 8TB drive was replaced with another 20TB one, then the pool can grow to use 20TB on all drives.
Also with the newer zfs versions one can even expand existing raidzN pools by just adding more drives of the same or larger capacities, and or replacing drives one by one with larger ones and growing it that way. zfs is awesome and I haven't had any data loss or major issues in the 6 years I've been using it.
And all the cool features like transparent compression, snapshots, incremental sends, scrubs and so much more make it honestly the best filesystem for multi disk arrays.
(When I tried btrfs it killed itself after 2 power cuts, meanwhile my zfs pools survived abuse that words cannot describe).
Denton@janusfox Good luck! I need to rebuild mine as it's starting to fill up.
... I picked the worst time for this so gonna try and clean up duplicates and junk files first.
@Denton Yeah duplicates are a constant issue. I even wrote some scripts to help reduce those. The issue these days seems to be raw video files for YT production.
I'll probably just start dumping a massive pile of these raw files on to old hard drives and let them sit on a shelf. It's the kind of thing that's hard to get rid of, but at the same time, shouldn't have money spent on storing it.