Topic: Geeky question

[Achim]

Cat6???

[DJ Doena]

Cat6???

t's a cable type, or more precisely, the shielding class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-6

[Achim]

Cat6???

t's a cable type, or more precisely, the shielding class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat-6

I am familiar with Cat5 (of course, we use it at work) and wondered what the improvements with Cat6 would be and it if would help me in any form. Although, my network at home is wireless and therefore a little on the slow side; audio streaming is o.k. but video streaming stutters. I'll read up a little a the link you gave.

[DJ Doena]

Although, my network at home is wireless and therefore a little on the slow side; audio streaming is o.k. but video streaming stutters.

You can by a hundred meters of extremely flexible and basically unbreakable wireless cable on eBay. 

[RossRoy]

You can by a hundred meters of extremely flexible and basically unbreakable wireless cable on eBay. 

 

I am familiar with Cat5 (of course, we use it at work) and wondered what the improvements with Cat6 would be and it if would help me in any form. Although, my network at home is wireless and therefore a little on the slow side; audio streaming is o.k. but video streaming stutters. I'll read up a little a the link you gave.

I'm guessing Cat6 in my situation doesn't actually change much of anything in regards to the quality of the link that an undamaged Cat5 cable would give. But, I got the Cat6 for a little under 20$ (for 30 feet). Same length Cat5e was a little over 15$, so I thought why not?

[Achim]

You can by a hundred meters of extremely flexible and basically unbreakable wireless cable on eBay. 

I won the auction!

[RossRoy]

That's not good.. I'm feeling a bit adventurous at the moment..

I've been a bit paranoid about my new NAS. I keep logging in just to check that the storage pool is still online, that there's no errors reported, that the temperatures are good, etc etc etc.

There's still 1 thing that I keep wondering, and that's "What would happen, really, if one of the drive was to fail?"

And this morning, I started thinking.. What harm would it do to take one of the drive offline, wipe it, then reattach it as a "new" drive?

Worse case, I still have the data distributed across 3 computers.. and would reassure me about the actual fault tolerance of my setup (as well as give me an idea of how long it takes to rebuild it)..

Decisions... Decisions...

[Najemikon]

Answer?

 

[RossRoy]

 

Easy for you to say! Gives "Proof of Concept" from someone else

But actually, seeing as I have all the data elsewhere in one form of another.. what have I got to lose, except some time?

Guess I'll do it tonight!

[Najemikon]

I planned to try it actually at some point. My NAS is two 640gb disks mirrored, but I added another 300gb disk I had spare. What's on the RAID will fit on that disk for a backup so I can test breaking it.

You first.


 

[RossRoy]

You first.

We'll know how it reacts in about 90 minutes! (I'm running a full disk wipe on one of the 500GB drive)

[RossRoy]

Well, it's not liking it at all! 

But I'm guessing it's because I replaced the drive... but with the exact same drive, wiped and partition destroyed.. but still the same serial # and everything. At least, the data really is still readable with a single failed drive, so I can still access it all and take a backup if need be. I'm still trying a few other things, we'll see how it turns out.

[RossRoy]

Alright, here's what happened. Looks like writing zeroes to the hard drive doesn't clear the zpool metadata, or, the zpool ID is linked to the hard drive identificaiton. In either case, if you wipe the partitions and write zeroes all over the drive, effectively deleting all data, the drive will become in a faulted state, and the pool gets messed up trying to identify it, causing massive problems (duplicate device names, resulting in the zpool being unable to be imported).

Doing the exact same action (switching out a hard drive) but with a DIFFERENT hard drive, works like a charm. Just repartition the drive as it should, and you're good to go. Basically, if you are going to reuse the same drive into a zpool, you have to somehow remove said drive from the pool by replacing, BEFORE putting it back in.

The good news is the zpool still worked and I could read the data (some of it I wanted to recover).

Moral of the story? Don't try causing a fault where there's none 

[RossRoy]

Well, I bit the bullet and bought a 1TB external hard drive to do backups of the NAS... just in case.. at least I can now feel a little better about putting important data on the NAS (which I've refrained from doing so far)

[Jimmy]

1TB external hard drive

Stupid question but... What is the capacity of that in Go to help me understand?
and what is the price of that?

Hard Disc capacity had sure improve over the year

computer #1 : no hard disc (tape recorder)
computer #2 : Don't remember, but it was an Atari ST
computer #3 : 20 megs
computer #4 : 1.1 Go
computer #5 : 80 Go