waking up to another dying hard disk – upgrade time!

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

At our house I am running a medium-sized operation when it comes to all the storage and in-house / home-automation needs of the family.

This is done by utilizing several products from QNAP, Synology and a custom built server infrastructure that does most of the heavy-lifting using Docker.

This morning I woke up to an eMail stating that one of the mirrored drives in the machine is reporting read-errors.

Since this drive is part of a larger array of spinning-rust style hard disks just replacing it would work but due to the life-time of those drives I am not particularly interested in more replacing in the very near future. So a more general approach seems right.

63083 lifetime hours = 2628 days = 7.2 years powered up

You can see what I mean. This drive is old. Very old. And so are its mates. Actually this is the newest drive of another 6 or so 1.5TB and 1TB drives in this array.

Since this redundant array in fact is still quite small and not fully used as most storage intensive non service-related disk space demands have moved to iSCSI and other means it’s not the case anymore that so many disks, so well redundant with so little disk space are needed anymore. Actual current space utilization seems about 20% of the available 2TB volume.

Time for an upgrade! Taking a look in the manual of the mainboard I had replaced 2 years ago I found that this mainboard does have dual NVMe m.2 ports. From which I can boot according to that same manual.

So I thought: Let’s start with replacing the boot drives and the /var/lib docker portions with something fast.

To my surprise Samsung is building 1 TB NVMe M.2 SSDs to a price I expected to be much higher.

Nice! So let me reeport back when this shipped and I can start the re-set-up of the operating system and docker environment. Which by all fairness should be straight forward. I will upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS in the same step – and the only more complex things I expect to happen is the boot-from-ZFS(on Linux) and iSCSI set-up of the machine.

If you got any tips or best-practice, let me know.

I just have started the catch-up on what happpened in the last 2 years to ZFS on Linux. My initial decision to use Linux 2 years ago as the main driver OS and Ubuntu as the distribution was based upon the exepectation to not have this as my hobby in the next years. And that expectation was fulfilled by Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.