On Sun, 24 Jan 2021 07:40:16 -0800 (PST) Rich Shepard <[email protected]> dijo:
>3. What should I read to learn how best to make use of this device? I have a Mediasonic 2-bay enclosure with a 6TB and an 8TB WD red. I set them up as RAID0, which resulted in a volume of 12TB because RAID0 gives you (number of drives) * (the size of the smallest drive). If I had it to do over again JBOD might have been a better choice because it would not have wasted 2TB of space. The drives were backed up nightly to a NAS as a mirror, so I didn't need redundancy within the Mediasonic. My Mediasonic has connectors for USB 3 and eSATA, and the computer that I connected it to had both of those ports as well. There isn't a lot of difference between the two connectors as to speed, and I didn't have an eSATA cable, so I used USB. After a couple years the USB port on the Mediasonic got flaky, so I bought an eSATA cable. I didn't notice any difference. But eventually I called Mediasonic and for $20 they sold me a new PC card with both connectors, only about 2cm square. It was trivial to open the case, and replace the old card. I mention this just so you know that I had good service from Mediasonic. If you want the drives in the Mediasonic to look like just one big drive, then your choices are RAID0 or JBOD. If you want two drives of your four to be one big drive mirrored to the other two, so you have redundancy within the Mediasonic, then I think you can make each pair RAID0 or JBOD, and then both of these volumes can be made into a RAID1 (but I've never done that, and I'm sure someone here will tell me that I'm wrong. But bear in mind that RAID0 is a bit faster on read/write than JBOD. Whenever I tell professionals who work on big data centers that I use RAID0 they immediately tell me what a bad idea it is because if either drive fails then you've lost the whole thing. But they don't realize that my RAID0 arrays are backed up nightly to a mirror on my network, so I do have redundancy, just not the way they are used to doing things. The Mediasonic and its drives are now about four years old so, although they are working fine, it was about 75% full, and I replaced it with a new Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that has four 7.68TB U.2 drives, also set up as a RAID0. (Fast!) The new setup lost its RAID array a few days ago and it looks like I'm going to have to recreate it. I'm still trying to figure out what caused the failure - right now it looks like TB3 on Linux is disconnecting the drives every 15 seconds, and this is a recent development because it was working fine for several weeks. In the meantime, since the middle of December, the Mediasonic has been sitting here unplugged. _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
