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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital (mashable.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

This feels like such a beginner question to be asking on Lemmy, let alone the tech community, but how does one go about setting up a RAID array to have my data mirrored? I only know the basics I remember about raid 1 and raid 0.

Is this RAID array something you can do without one of those "multi-hard drive units"? I have 2 16TB hard drives that I'd like to have one as a mirror copy of the first as a backup that updates at the same time but they feel too big to fit into one of those units. But maybe setting up a RAID array could be done programmatically.

I'd love and appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction!

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    nowadays RAID is done with software, on linux if possible. common choices are ZFS and md-raid. you connect drives with SATA or SAS to a computer, and you can add them to a pool. drives added to pool will be formatted once.

    hardware raid is discouraged, because if the RAID card fails you need a replacement of the exact same kind, with same firmware version, and they can have other difficulties too that software RAID solutions don't.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    That's great, I'd love to not have to buy one of those machines, and I have been running my JF on a laptop just running Linux with a single one of the 16tb drives.

    If the drives added to the pool need to be formatted, is there a possibility that it wipes the data on it? I'll take a bit of time to read up on some of the options you mentioned.

    Thanks for the help!

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    If the drives added to the pool need to be formatted, is there a possibility that it wipes the data on it?

    that's what I meant, yes, but you said you have 2 16 TB drives right? at least with ZFS, setting up a mirror can be done only starting with a single drive. It's a godsend.

    first, you take the empty drive, check that it's actually empty, and if so, create a ZFS pool of a single drive from it, with zpool create. copy all your data over. you can use rsync, it has a bunch of options for preserving most filesystem metadata, and for printing progress.

    when done, check that absolutely everything got transferred, and add the other 16 TB drive too to the pool with zpool attach. doing this will convert the pool with only a disk vdev, into a pool with a mirror vdev of 2 disks.

    further recommended reading: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/8/zpool.8.html

    you may want to enable compression from the beginning. if you do it later, existing data won't be compressed. media files mostly don't benefit from this. compression is enabled on the dataset level, with the zfs command, if you set it to lz4 (recommended alg) for the root dataset, everything will be compressed that way.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Oh this is perfect, thanks so much! I've got one of the hard drives in use but I could definitely wipe the other one to make a proper copy with the zpool.

    Thanks for giving me a fun little week task!

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    It depends greatly on what kind of machine you are running. Many PC's have RAID capabilities built into their BIOS. Others will need special RAID software, which will vary by OS. Finally you can buy the multidisk raid enclosures, which may either have their own raid capabilities on the hardware or may use a software solution to go with the hardware.

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