Storage server upgrade part 1

The first part of the upgrade was to the existing storage server. The existing server is in a Meshify 2 case and has 10 x 16TB HDD drives and a couple of SATA SSD's to use as log devices.

The change was to bump the memory up to the maximum it supports (128GB). I tried around a year ago however the memory I got didn't work and the computer wouldn't even POST. This time using different memory modules it worked.

While I was at it I disabled the log devices and removed the 2TB SATA SSD's. The log device is only used for writes. Seeing as the disks are full I don't write anything to the drives so there is no point in having a log device. I put a single 1TB SATA SSD in their place to use as a cache drive. I let the system run for a day so I could get some stats on how it was being used. It had a zero hit rate so I decided to disable it.

On the subject of stats I seem to be getting around 75% hit rate on the memory cache (or ARC as its called under ZFS). A cache drive (or L2ARC) needs memory to manage it, so removing the cache drive leaves more memory for the ARC. L2ARC only stores things that were evicted from the ARC. I will physically remove the SSD from the machine the next time I am working on the hardware.

For part two I am going to move the 4 x 8TB drives that are currently in the external HDD enclosure into a second storage server that I am building using surplus parts. I've ordered another Meshify 2 case and some extra HDD trays for it.


Update: 8th of Jan

It seem iptables can do this so I need to experiment a bit. See scalingo.com/blog/iptables for examples.

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