4Kn drives Topic is solved

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dcol
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4Kn drives

Post by dcol »

I have been using Primocache v3 on my RAID array for a while. Then I just upgraded to v4 and now my drives are not supported.
Question is, should I go back to version 3, or was it determined that 4Kn was an issue using v3, even though it always worked fine for me.
The only reason I have Primocache is to cache the RAID. my other drives are NVMe so it is pointless to use Cache on them.

Will 4Kn drives be added in a future update?
janusz521
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by janusz521 »

Yes, the support for 4Kn drivers is expected to come soon. Check the announcement thread: viewtopic.php?f=32&t=5158
Shoonay
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by Shoonay »

Only 4 days to go ;)
zBeeble
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by zBeeble »

Really? I was just encountering this. I had to blow away and restore my Storage Space partition --- and now it's 4KN.
zBeeble
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by zBeeble »

Being the 29th of January, can we get some confirmation of this?
Shoonay wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 3:50 pm Only 4 days to go ;)
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Jaga
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by Jaga »

zBeeble wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 6:21 am Really? I was just encountering this. I had to blow away and restore my Storage Space partition --- and now it's 4KN.
Just a suggestion based on personal experience: don't use MS Storage Spaces. They are problematic and less compatible than other solutions available. The one I use after testing many (including Storage Spaces) is Stablebit Drivepool. You can cache the underlying logical partitions (drives) using Primocache.

That however has no bearing on the use of RAID, which I also don't suggest that people use anymore for various reasons. The only time I'd recommend RAID to a customer now is if their speed needs for a volume exceed the hardware's native capabilities.
zBeeble
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by zBeeble »

Jaga wrote: Fri Jan 29, 2021 10:08 pm
zBeeble wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 6:21 am Really? I was just encountering this. I had to blow away and restore my Storage Space partition --- and now it's 4KN.
Just a suggestion based on personal experience: don't use MS Storage Spaces. They are problematic and less compatible than other solutions available. The one I use after testing many (including Storage Spaces) is Stablebit Drivepool. You can cache the underlying logical partitions (drives) using Primocache.

That however has no bearing on the use of RAID, which I also don't suggest that people use anymore for various reasons. The only time I'd recommend RAID to a customer now is if their speed needs for a volume exceed the hardware's native capabilities.
I'm just going to come out of the gate honestly. You make very little sense. Firstly, compared to whatever stablebit is, M$ storage spaces are at least standard --- supported by FreeBSD and Linux --- so with exactly what are they incompatible? Secondly, I would advise anyone to always use RAID. Disks are cheap and your information that you've carefully collected is worth it in the face of any drive failures.

RAID does provide some performance benefits ... and some drawbacks. I wouldn't recommend RAID for specifically performance --- if you have a performance problem, then analyzing the problem and your hardware choices are best --- but RAID definitely delivers for data safety. In fact, I never deploy a FreeBSD server without ZFS-based RAID these days. Even having to go fix a broken machine is worth a spare disk for me.
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Jaga
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by Jaga »

With the advent of larger and larger drives, and much longer rebuild times on parity errors, RAID 5 (and recently even 6) just pose too great a risk to data anymore.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid- ... g-in-2019/

You can of course use Storage Spaces if you like, but I found it much like MS Edge: less appealing the more I looked at it. Primocache doesn't work with FreeBSD or Linux, so bringing them up here is a bit of a moot point unless you simply want to point out it "works with other operating systems".

On Windows, with Primocache, I personally found Drivepool to offer the greatest benefits with the fewest drawbacks. All of what I stated is personal opinion, so arguing it is a bit baffling. Either take it as advice, or don't.
zBeeble
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by zBeeble »

There are so many errors in that article that it's ridiculous. If you accept their premise, then NO storage is usable because all storage has uncorrectable error rates. I don't think the author understands RAID.

As a user of RAID in many forms, I almost don't know where to begin the debunking. First, good RAID (be it 1, 5, 10, 50, 6, 60 (6 and 60 don't really exist --- they're bad misnomers used by people who don't understand the problem or the nomenclature) ... good RAID is capable of verifying data and fixing it. Without the RAID, you have no chance fixing it. I have ZFS arrays that have been in service 20 years --- and I scrub them (zfs term for reading and verifying every byte) every few months. I have never lost data.

But Storage spaces aren't "good raid" ... they're just "OK raid" ... if you store many terrabytes of data and you don't have block checkums that are adequate (so... BOTH your big drive and my storage --- neither of them have adequate checksums) you may flip a few bits over years of service.

now... if that's data you care about ... get ZFS and whatnot. Really. But if it's just video game data (which can recheck itself by Steam's "check local files feature) then storage spaces with primocache is an excellent solution.

But if it's data you care about, you want intelligent raid --- which ... if you don't have a big pile of money ... means zfs. using a single drive is demonstrably worse than using multiple drives (single drives fail and you loose everything) --- but the only want to protect against bitrot is something like zfs.

As for the time-to-heal drive failures? Well... it takes about 4h to replace a 4T drive. The chances of 2 drives dying (I use 2 parity raid in my array) during that time is astronomically small. You don't examine bit-rot data for that, you examine MTBF data.
zBeeble
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Re: 4Kn drives

Post by zBeeble »

Oh... and on topic, when is 4KN support coming out?
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