Large EXT4 Volumes

Hi,

I was using a Raspberry Pi3 running open media vault over the weekend as a test bed for what I may expect when my Rock64 arrives and first impressions were that I was very impressed - seems a great bit of kit and exactly what I'm looking for however it didn't seem to like my 24TB hardware RAID array over USB (yes. it was slow. like 15mb/s max, but as said this is just testing).

For stability I wanted to wipe and format the whole 24TB 'physical disk' inside OMV except I kept getting the (now looking back on it) amusing error 'Read Error 27 - Weird Stuff May Happen' which I'm guessing was down to breaking the 16TB mark? I also SSH'ed in and had issues with parted and gdisk and fdisk.

Is this something I'll also run into when running the Rock64 and if so how do I get around it? (....or on the Pi for that matter?)

To get up and running I just NTFS'ed the drive via the one and only Windows machine I own which left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth as I'd much rather EXT4 and knowing how unhappy it was about EXT4 it still made me uneasy about the whole setup in general.

I did re-configure the hardware RAID to drop it below 16TB which was fine - and would currently backup all of my data, but for me personally I like to know that my backup volume is capable of continuing even if I max out all of my storage and still have some overhead leftover for retention and as the USB RAID cannot support multiple hardware RAID's I'd like to get use of the whole 24TB in a single volume even if I'm forced to have it partitioned. The only thing I didn't get round to testing was booting Ubuntu to go key to try and lay down the EXT4 but again knowing the OMV instance couldn't do this itself didn't inspire confidence.

Some background on the setup is that this 24TB drive will backup multiple other drives also running a hardware RAID of their own..... as they say RAID is not a backup.... and all this is in addition to a partial cloud backup of everything that is vitally important.

thanks,

Dan

Zitat von tkaiser

The recommended OMV image for ROCK64 uses a 64-bit kernel with an armhf userland (for compatibility with Plex and also for greatly reduced memory consumption) so be prepared for another surprise when your ROCK64 arrives.

In my personal opinion (USB) RAID5 that exceeds a few TB is just a horribly bad idea (especially when using filesystems like ext4) but since users do not focus on important stuff (why do they play RAID? What's the reason to waste disks for almost nothing?) it's useless to warn anyway

Maybe I'm missing something, but which surprise will the Rock64 bring? its early here

I also wouldn't rely solely on RAID5 but in this case as its a backup of 2 other systems which are both running a RAID (...neither of which is 5) and one of those also has a cloud backup also all I need is just a local copy of the data and I've got the hardware sitting around and was gifted the drives so has cost me next to nothing.

Out of interest (and don't mean to sound off as I have no doubt whatsoever that you know far more than me) but what would be a better solution for near zero investment?

Thanks, yes, I've had to replace a failed RAID member drive before - and on this particular unit as it happens.... it rebuilt (which granted took awhile) but data was fine and intact. I've also purposely failed drives and rebuilt with test setups just to see what the consequences. although not specifically regarding RAID this whole exercise was a test to try different configurations and to see if I could access the OMV written data as just a plain ol' USB drive on another machine or even append to it and re-attach to OMV. also knowing nothing is guaranteed I keep many copies in many different places as whats a RAID worth if a controller dies.

I should be clear though this is a home setup........ and even telling my wife that she has to keep off it is no concern

I've flattened this backup drive re-attached as a USB drive for now, restarted my backup from scratch which will take the best part of a few days to complete but even if it falls over and dies due to stress so be it. I like to mess around to the point of destruction so that when it does matter I'm better informed.

If it was anything more than a home setup with all due respect (and I really mean that) I wouldn't be using OMV.

Dan

its not a distrust of the OS but outside of home use we have to have guaranteed 24/7 availability and bandwidth for storage in the multi petabytes so need gotta have those service contracts... for those we are just power users.

at home, I like to experiment and learn so when everything is working perfectly I usually like take it all apart to see if I can make it run better, smoother, increase my understanding or just learn something new hence picking up a bit of software I just found out existed aswell as a bunch of hardware I have and a SBC from China to see what I can do with it. The Pi in question is already now running as Raspian Lite monitoring a UPS instead of being directly connected to a machine for the sheer 'why not'.

I tend to work exclusively on Mac both at work and at home (bar the gaming PC I built for my son) but love the power of the command line to support and manage day to day so naturally find myself drawn to Linux and what works for me is to have a goal, read a bunch of stuff, fail, try again, keep trying, ask and keep working the problem. My OMV NAS like the rest of my setup will have a grand total of 2 users

Dan