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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Not really. Even TrueNAS Core (ZFS) highly recommends ECC memory to mitigate this possibility from occurring. After reading more about filesystems in general and when money allowed, I took this advice as gospel when upgrading my server from junk I found laying around to a proper Supermicro ATX server mobo.

    The difference I think is that BRTFS is more vulnerable to becoming unmountable whereas other filesystems have a better chance of still being mountable but contain missing or corrupted data. The latter usually being preferable.

    For desktop use some people don’t recommend ZFS as if the right memory corruption conditions are met, it can eat your data as well. It’s why Linus Torvalds goes on a rant every now and then about how bullshit it is that Intel normalized paywalling ECC memory to servers only.

    I disagree and think the benefits of ZFS on a desktop without ECC outweigh a rare possibility that can be mitigated with backups.






  • Windows 10 LTSC FTW!!! I just installed it and wow is it snappier and devoid of nearly all of those annoyances. I have no idea if productivity apps are affected by its stripped down nature but for Steam gaming it’s perfect. I get less lag spikes on steamVR.

    I haven’t trusted Windows in years. This is just for gaming. I have a physically separate hot swappable Optane SSDs for Linux and Windows Gaming.

    For those who will winge at me for not just switching to Linux. During this process I gave a concerted effort to give Linux a go and chose Manjaro KDE to try for steamVR gaming. It sucked. Once I had worked out that it was a permissions issue (It’s always a fucking permissions issue under Linux) and just ran it under the root account, there was extremely high latency for the VR compositor to HMD display. Completely unusable as it made me sick and that’s usually very hard. I tried X11 and Wayland. Direct and Non Direct output modes. No success.







  • My solution is RAIDZ5 and storing the backup on LTO6 tape with parity/erasure code. I think the fact that scrub times take 24 hours even on 16TB drives is already over the safety margin. If a drive failure happens, the first thing I’ll do to run a manual diff backup which should take a fraction of the time and then run the ZFS resilver.

    I’m beginning to see why SSD RAID is being considered now. My guess for HDDs in enterprise is that a RAID 15 (I made this up) would be considered. What I mean is data is stored on two identical servers each running RAID5 or 6. Off the shelf solutions like Gluster exist and that seems to be gaining traction at least according to Linus Tech Tips.








  • Well I’m in my mid 20’s so I’m hoping for at least that long :). No I won’t likely need alot of what I store to last that long although I am a member of r/DataHoarder (not sure if they’re on lemmy yet) but for a few items like family photos/videos it’s nice to have it written in a way that I can mostly just set and forget. With the standardization and open source implementation of LTFS you have even less worry about having the software to read it in the future. A SAS IT mode HBA and linux with a git clone of the LTFS repo is all you need.

    In terms of cost the drive was very expensive ($2500 NOS from eBay US) but if you treat that as the one off entry cost, the tapes are cheaper for me to buy than the equivalent in HDDs here in Australia. That’s comparing ~$460 20tb EXOS HDDs from serverpartdeals.com to $43 x 8 = $344 2.5TB LTO-6 from stutchdata.com.au.

    Also I store the tapes in IP67 boxes from bunnings along with a pack of desiccant and put the boxes in a cool but damp area. Don’t really have alot of choice where I live. It’s either that or hot daily temperature swings. Basement vs attic/garage.

    I hope that’s enough to store them correctly environmentally speaking. I am in the process of working out how to clean family VHS tapes that were not stored correctly and that’s not an operation I want to revisit. An extended project is to make 900mhz button cell humidity/temperature monitors to notify me when desiccant has expired.

    This may seem excessive but I would argue most don’t do enough in an age where more and more is being stored digitally as the only copy rather than print, etc. I feel this is a small price to pay to keep the still more compact and convenient all digital lifestyle without the data loss issues most people experience. The drive was expensive to buy into but with how little I use it I hope it’s going to last a long time.