[mythtv-users] Storage best practices in 2017

[Joseph Fry]

On Sat, Apr 1, 2017, 8:55 PM Mark <fairlane at springcom.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 03/23/2017 10:31 PM, Will Dormann wrote:
> > That's a little confusing. You care about "video recordings" but not
> > "recordings" ?
> Sorry, video recordings means the DVD's i spent years ripping.  The
> 'recordings' is the stuff that myth tapes off the sat box, which i
> usually could care less since i don't have tons saved up to watch usually.
> >
> > I'd only consider ZFS if you've got 8GB of RAM or more.  The more the
> > merrier.
> 8gb of ram in the server.
> >
> > Using ZFS (with more than one drive, obviously) or a RAID (linux md) can
> > help minimize downtime in the case of a drive failure.   With or without
> > redundant drives, you'll want two things to be safe:
> > 1) Backups.    RAID isn't backup, yadda yadda...
> > 2) Configure smartd to do scheduled self tests (I do daily short and
> > weekly long) *and* configure it to email you in the case of a failing
> drive.
> >
> > At least with spinning-platter disks, properly-configured SMART will
> > often give you a warning before the drive dies.  (it will die).  With
> > SSDs, I'm not completely sure how useful SMART is.
> I'm still uncertain ZFS makes sense.  merits?
> >
> >
> > -WD
>

I have always considered ZFS as a way of decoupling your storage hardware
and the logical storage, so in some ways it can be easier to manage over
time.  For example, its relatively trivial to add and remove drives without
data loss... And those drives can be completely different.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of ZFS are snapshots... Great for some
workloads, though perhaps not MythTV.

Because MythTV has native support for using multiple drives for virtually
all media types... And there is not tremendous value in snapshots with
mythtv (im sure someone would argue otherwise).  I really think it just
adds a layer of complexity and overhead that is simply unnecessary.

For Mythtv, I really encourge people, especially those new to mythtv, to
run JBOD.  You dont lose anything (except perhaps transparent recovery from
a failed disk), but you seriously simplify troubleshooting if you have
issues.  You can certainly have a lot of fun with RAID, ZFS, etc.. if you
want, but if your objective is to have a reliable system that just about
every question you have has well documented solutions, then keep it
simple.  Its hard to troubleshoot issues when your running myth in a vm, on
a cluster with a zfs san...

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20170402/70b329b8/attachment.html>