I want to transfer 80 TB of data to another locatio . I already have the drives for it. The idea is to copy everything to it, fly it to the target and use or copy the data on/to the server.
What filesystem would you use and would you use a raid configuration? Currently I lean towards 8 single disk filesystems on the 10 TB drives with ext4, because it is simple. I considered ZFS because of the possiblity to scrub at the target destination and/or pool all drives. But ZFS may not be available at the target.
There is btrfs which should be available everywhere because it is in mainline linux and ZFS is not. But from my knowledge btrfs would require lvm to pool disks together like zfs can do natively.
Pooling the drives would also be a problem if one disk gets lost during transit. If I have everything on 8 single disks at least the remaining data can be used at the target and they only have to wait for the missing data.
I like to read about your opinions or practical experience with similar challanges.
What? Lol no. They’ll travel fine.
Multiple disks with many moving parts, containing 80TB of data on magnetic platters flying at high altitude where they’ll be subjected to far more physical impacts, radiation, and cosmic rays than at sea level.
Yeah, it’s a risk.
Here’s a really amazing Radiolab episode about bit flips!
You kids think HDDs just failed daily or something. I flew all over the place with a laptop with an HDD for years, as did many others. It’ll be fine. Especially since it’s unlikely they would be using the drives while traveling.
From a position of handling corporate data on a daily basis, I am pretty confident that data integrity is top of mind.
I agree with both of you. Somehow I don’t worry about the drive in my laptop but 80 TB of scientific data is another thing, and I want to make sure it is the same data when it arrives.
Really, then why is there an explicit SMART conveyance test?
It’s to test for damage that may have occurred during shipping.
And how often does it happen?
Often enough that there’s a test designed to detect it specifically. If you want hard data you’ll have to find it on your own, I don’t have any handy.
How do you ensure that is doesn’t happen? If this is corporate data that can be key.
this is scientific data.
Funfact, I recently did a scrub on my offline backup drive of my work PC. It correct around 250 errors. I wouldn’t have noticed any problems if I had used ext4 instead of btrfs.