And we're full

I've had the plotter churning out tasks fairly consistently since the last post. I have now got the storage machine (or farmer) at 90% of its 29TB disk space. That is 254 plots worth. I'm running ZFS on the farmer so they don't recommend going over 90% for it to work.

 

I have ordered one of these external hard disk boxes that holds 4 drives. It doesn't support RAID functionality. It says it supports up to 16TB drives so that suggests to me that rather than presenting itself as a 4 drives like a JBOD would, it will appear as one logical disk. I will find out when it arrives next week. It connects to the host computer by USB 3.0. I was hoping for a JBOD type of device but the few (4 or 8 disk) models I found that claim to be JBOD are sold out.

The idea for the external hard disk box is to allow me to copy the existing pool to the external disk box. I can then add the remaining 8TB drives into the farmer, destroy the existing storage pool of 6 drives and recreate it with 8 drives. While ZFS 2.1 (which hasn't been released yet) does allow adding drives to a pool it won't adjust the stripe size for the existing data which is rather a pain. I may setup two smaller pools of 4 drives each so if I need to upsize in the future I can simply copy the data from one pool to somewhere, destroy the pool and create a new one using larger disks.

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