File systems!

[magic]

Another use case for btrfs/ZFS: USB disk enclosures.

[...]
I'm having data corruption with USB/SATA bridges. IME these chips are shit until proven otherwise with thorough testing. (Frankly, even then they may still be shit, just a matter of testing more).

My first ever btrfs is up and running, on a slightly dubious USB disk enclosure.

Passes a simple corruption detection test: locate a file on disk with filefrag, overwrite it on the raw block device with dd.
Scrub finds the error, and no other errors so far.

Will give it a try to see if btrfs bugs manage to kill my data faster than USB bridge bugs normally would

As a bonus, my data are completely protected from Windows users without encryption.

[Marco]

Nightly backups for a couple of weeks, then weekly, and finally monthly, before stored on RO media.

Don't forget to have two sets of tapes with multiple storage sites, cause that's really what small businesses do

They'll more likely buy something like Acronis, with incremental backups to whatever NAS the salesman pushes and offsite backup to the cloud. The salesman should push raid 1/10, because storage is too cheap and rebuild SNAFUs too big a a headache to deal with for the tiny data amounts of ye average small business with incremental backup.

Until storage overhead starts being a significant part of your bottom line and you have the expertise to take RAID degradation into account, just use the simplest solution with the easiest to deal with failure modes.

[golden_labels]

Since ReiserFS has been mentioned: you may wish to not deploy it to new installations. ReiserFS is deprecated and planned for removal in 2025. LTS releases will retain it until at least 2026, but moving towards a deprecated technology is a poor choice.

[DiTBho]

(Youtube video, "The New File System in Windows: ReFS")

[paulca]

Slightly related to filesystems.

I was checking disk speeds on Windows and discovered that the basic SATA SSD runs at about 550MB/s.  However a single Gen4 NVMe drive runs at 5500MB/s.

So, as I had two of them, both on Gen4 4X bandwidth, I striped them into one volume.  11000MB/s read speed woot.

A small improvement.    Should make steam games load a bit faster.

In other news I built a new linux server and this time it's getting  RAID1 rootfs.  On AMD EFI you can have cloned boot contexts and all!

If it sounds excessive, do notice the sweat spot we are in right not for 500Gb and 1Tb Gen4 NVMes.  You can find them for £30 hunt.  And a dual riser card is also about £30.