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Yes, that's the right idea. NAS/RAID drives have a different error recovery strategy, because the assumption is that they'll be part of a multi-drive arrangemen

Yes, that's the right idea. NAS/RAID drives have a different error recovery strategy, because the assumption is that they'll be part of a multi-drive arrangement where failing fast (and allowing the containing system to handle recovery) is preferable to avoiding failure if at all possible (but potentially taking a long time and thus causing the containing system to think the drive has stopped functioning properly and fail the whole thing out). I can't point you to any specific documentation off the top of my head, but this is a well-known position that I've seen described explicitly several times. I'm afraid that does mean your choice of a Red for a single-disk system was not ideal. Presumably you keep backups of any valuable data anyway, but if downtime for recovery would be a significant problem for you then you might want to consider replacing that drive with something more suitable for your situation.

magicalhippo 7y ago
If one uses ZFS, one can instruct ZFS to keep multiple copies of the data. It will try to spread those copies among multiple disks, but in single-disk systems it will just spread the duplicate blocks over that disk. Since ZFS does checksum verification on every read, it has a much better chance of recovering from a few bad sectors. Downside though is that the default RPi installs are 32bit and ZFS was written with 64bit-only in mind, and AFAIK there are still some issues and limitations when running on a 32bit system.
bityard 7y ago
I should hand in my geek card, this feels like something I should have known about. In my defense, though, the HD manufacturers offer little to no information about the _technical_ differences between their drive lines. All of their documentation just says, "designed for X use case". I do have backups, that's not my concern. My concern is that _when_ there is a read/write error (which are completely normal events with today's hard drive technology), the drive just gives up right away instead of making a few attempts. This could easily translate into (silently!) lost data in a single-disk scenario.

magicalhippo 7y ago

If one uses ZFS, one can instruct ZFS to keep multiple copies of the data. It will try to spread those copies among multiple disks, but in single-disk systems it will just spread the duplicate blocks over that disk. Since ZFS does checksum verification on every read, it has a much better chance of recovering from a few bad sectors. Downside though is that the default RPi installs are 32bit and ZFS was written with 64bit-only in mind, and AFAIK there are still some issues and limitations when running on a 32bit system.

bityard 7y ago

I should hand in my geek card, this feels like something I should have known about. In my defense, though, the HD manufacturers offer little to no information about the _technical_ differences between their drive lines. All of their documentation just says, "designed for X use case". I do have backups, that's not my concern. My concern is that _when_ there is a read/write error (which are completely normal events with today's hard drive technology), the drive just gives up right away instead of making a few attempts. This could easily translate into (silently!) lost data in a single-disk scenario.