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[–] 11 points 11 months ago (12 children)

Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.

If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.

Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.

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  • [+] [S] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    It’s a good idea to use what you know. I don’t have much experience with btrfs but if it does what it says on the tin then it should be safe to use.

    Copying the contents at the target is a good strategy. If the drives are to be put into 27/7 use later I would probably consider wiping them and run an integrity test before putting them to use, as once they start being used it will be too late (and stay as a doubt in the back of my mind).

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

    What? Lol no. They'll travel fine.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Really, then why is there an explicit SMART conveyance test?

    It's to test for damage that may have occurred during shipping.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    And how often does it happen?

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    Multiple disks with many moving parts, containing 80TB of data on magnetic platters flying at high altitude where they'll be subjected to far more physical impacts, radiation, and cosmic rays than at sea level.

    Yeah, it's a risk.

    Here's a really amazing Radiolab episode about bit flips!

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    You kids think HDDs just failed daily or something. I flew all over the place with a laptop with an HDD for years, as did many others. It'll be fine. Especially since it's unlikely they would be using the drives while traveling.

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