On 02/04/2024 13:53, David Christensen wrote:
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions regarding how to use
magnetic hard disk drives, commodity x86 computers, and Debian for
long-term data storage with ensured integrity?
I use Btrfs, on all my systems, including some servers, with soft Raid1
and Raid10 modes (because these modes are considered stable and
production ready). I decided on Btrfs not ZFS, because Btrfs allows to
migrate drives on the fly while partition is live and heavily used,
replace them with different sizes and types, mixed capacities, change
Raid levels, change amount of drives too. I could go from single drive
to Raid10 on 4 drives and back while my data is 100% available at all
times.
It saved my bacon many times, including hard checksum corruption on NVMe
drive which otherwise I would never know about. Thanks to Btrfs I
located the corrupted files, fixed them, got hardware replaced under
warranty.
Also helped with corrupted RAM: Btrfs just refused to save file because
saved copy couldn't match read checksum from the source due to RAM bit
flips. Diagnosed, then replaced memory, all good.
I like a lot when one of the drives get ATA reset for whatever reason,
and all other drives continue to read and write, I can continue using
the system for hours, if I even notice. Not possible in normal
circumstances without Raid. Once the problematic drive is back, or after
reboot if it's more serious, then I do "scrub" command and everything is
resynced again. If I don't do that, then Btrfs dynamically correct
checksum errors on the fly anyway.
And list goes on - I've been using Btrfs for last 5 years, not a single
problem to date, it survived hard resets, power losses, drive failures,
countless migrations.