spencer

Yeah it was 2006 and that was how you got the MP3 files onto your iPod Nano. This was back when “mobile internet” consisted of “m.website.com” links that loaded a page without a style sheet at dial-up speeds that was designed to be navigated with a D-pad.

The year was 2006, and the 80 GB HDD in my Dell Optiplex 790 was full of podcasts, stolen music, and episodes of Dr. Who…

Stealing other people’s cultural heritage is their cultural heritage

Honestly the way I always look at it is just take the lifetime cost and divide it by the yearly cost and if I think the product/license deal will exist for that long (and I’ll use it for that long) it’s worth it otherwise not. Like, I have lifetime Plex and frankly I don’t expect the, to exist forever but I like the premium features and I’ve had lifetime for long enough that I’ve saved money.

Not mine but my partner’s machine (which I build and largely maintain for her) is a custom Debian install on ZFS root using ZFS boot menu and running a custom minimal i3 desktop environment.

Honestly, if you’re doing regular backups and your ZFS system isn’t being used for business you’re probably fine. Yes, you are at increased risk of a second disk failure during resilver but even if that happens you’re just forced to use your backups, not complete destruction of the data.

You can also mitigate the risk of disk failure during resilver somewhat by ensuring that your disks are of different ages. The increased risk comes somewhat from the fact that if you have all the same brand of disks that are all the same age and/or from the same batch/factory they’re likely to die from age around the same time, so when one disk fails others might be soon to follow, especially during the relatively intense process of resilvering.

Otherwise, with the number of disks you have you’re likely better off just going with mirrors rather than RAIDZ at all. You’ll see increased performance, especially on write, and you’re not losing any space with a 3-way mirror versus a 3-disk RAIDZ2 array anyway.

The ZFS pool design guidelines are very conservative, which is a good thing because data loss can be catastrophic, but those guidelines were developed with pools that are much larger than yours and for data in mind that is fundamentally irreplaceable, such as user generated data for a business versus a personal media server.

Also, in general backups are more important than redundancy, so it’s good you’re doing that already. RAID is about maintaining uptime, data security is all about backups. Personally, I’d focus first on a solid 3-2-1 backup plan rather than worrying too much about trying to mitigate your current array suffering catastrophic failure.

Another option is to avoid the installer entirely and install from a live environment using chroot and whatever your distro’s installation bootstrap tool is. I started using this method to install Debian on ZFS root using this method for a while and it’s become my go-to method for installing most distros as it gives you the most control over the resulting OS. It will also often take some distro-specific knowledge but is also a valuable learning opportunity.

I tend to agree - I have no love lost for Microsoft but I’m also willing to admit when they’ve got some good tech.