Topic: Recent downtime and data loss - page 3. (Read 6103 times)

That sucks but at least its working again.

Looks like in lost four posts. My signature campaign require me to have 165 posts. I remember I reached it. When the forums came back online, I have 161 posts.. anyway, good to hear the forums is back online.

The forum went down right after I hit the preview button and just as I realized that my post was missing a [/QUOTE] tag. For a second or two, I got BBcode confused with HTML and thought there was a possibility that I broke the forum.

Anyway, to those who aren't sure if they have posts that are deleted or not (particularly to those who post a lot and might not remember how many posts they made prior to the data loss), go through your browser history and you'll get an idea of which posts you need to re-post.

This totally defeated the purpose of running RAID 10, such high fail rate is already higher than conventional HDD, and I don't think RAID 0 is needed for SSD, they are already enough fast. Use two RAID 1 to backup each other is a better solution, but anyway this is very strange, RAID 1 should give enough warning before a total failure

Thank you.   

Backup software. Plenty about.

The whole internet is important to me. My home computer is important to me. Without my home computer, I wouldn't be able to access the Internet as easily.

I use my home computer for other things. I empathize with people in their love/hate relationships with their own computers. Yet mine is mission critical to me.

If something was mission critical, it wouldn't be running on a home computer in the first place.
But since you asked, a couple of disks, software raid, Linux. and a good backup schedule. Job done.

Do not underestimate, the Plain Old Bugs (tm), Plain Old Human Errors (tm) and the Drunk or Drugged SysAdmin (r)

Much more common than destruction by fire

With an operation like BitcoinTalk, or any other well-funded operation, this might be doable. But can the little guy (gal) afford this for their home computer? What exists for the little people?

Thanks for posting the detailed information about what happened. From a technical perspective, it is interesting reading about how things are configured.

deepceleron, I'm actually planning to use a RAIDZ2 pool for a database server that I'm working on as it looks like a very nice solution. RAIDZ2 only allows two disks to fail but I am liking what I read about ZFS thus far. The LZ4 compression also looks to be pretty handy.

What happens if I write my password down on two pieces of paper and then set both papers on fire, will I lose my password? Please don't ask such silly questions in a Theymos thread for the sake of spamming your signature.


There is an interesting aspect of RAID arrays when using SSDs in a mirrored configuration that can only tolerate the failure of one drive - you are writing identical data to identical drives, and should expect them to fail in identical ways, killing two drives at once.

Physical hard drives are more subject to mechanical tolerances that vary between samples. The disk coatings are not deposited equally, the bearings are not made molecularly identical, the windings in the heads and the motors aren't perfect matches. We would expect given a high intensity and identical load to two drives that it would be virtually impossible for them to suffer failure at the same time.

SSDs are different. Some drives have firmware that specifically bricks the drive or turns it into a read-only drive after a certain number of writes. While the actual memory cells may fail differently between the drives, they wear at a predictable statistical rate and there is a reserve of usually 2-5% of drive space of extra sectors that will finally be exhausted at nearly identical times given identical write patterns.

SSDs push the limit of what can be stored on silicon, so they have many layers of error correction to go along with the wear leveling. It is quite hard to get bad data back out of a well-designed Tier 1 drive.

However, failure of SSDs can be random and capricious, especially the OCZ/Patriot/Crucial bottom-tier drives that just shit themselves for no reason. As it is unlikely the forum completely used up the drive wear life on it's drives, it is more likely random crap-drive failure or RAID controller failure.

For reference, look at the tests here: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes - they designed a test specifically to kill SSDs with writes and left it running 24/7 for over a year on six drives. You can see that the SMART wear indicators on most drives indicate the amount of drive life left, some lock up after the reserve is used, and some keep going into write error territory. Only one drive unexpectedly died. SMART analysis of forum's drives will likely indicate the status of the reallocated sector count and wear leveling count to see if failure was unexpected.

Outside of the SSDs themselves failing, most hardware RAID controllers are pretty dumb (and if you are spending less than ~$400 you are not even getting hardware RAID). They just write the same data to two drives. There is no error correcting or checksumming, so they are useless to fix corruption, and actually are less tolerant than just a single drive would be. If you want to see scary, look up "RAID 5 write hole", basically there is no way for these RAIDs to tolerate power loss, making on-controller battery backup super important.

Also, consumer hardware just plan HAS errors, and hardware RAID is not written to deal with them: http://www.zdnet.com/article/has-raid5-stopped-working/

Also majorly important is that the system must be running ECC RAM, and the RAID controller must also have ECC RAM if it has cache slots.

I am getting much more behind ZFS RAID. It is very impressive. It is software RAID run by the OS. This is no longer a bad thing. The CPU and OS has hundreds of times more processing and RAM than RAID cards. There is a journal written that can be replayed upon power loss and commits are made to the disk in a way that data will never be corrupted. Everything on the disks is self-healing with error-correction checksummed. The OS can talk directly to the drives and their SMART status to understand drive state. You can run RAID on standard SATA controllers, and when your motherboard burns up, mount the drives in any other motherboard and on any other controller. You don't need to have hot-spares and lengthy rebuilds, you can have RAIDZ3 - three extra drives of parity - so it would take three drive failures to take out your disk array.

Then mirror the whole machine automatically with High-Availibility storage (HAST) and CARP in BSD. Backups are now just for when the whole place burns to the ground.

I can't really see this being a conspiracy tbh. Unless damning evidence is presented I'll keep believing that is was some legit downtime due to the issues theymos talked about. The fact that this ha never happened to the forum makes me trust him a bit more about this.

Thanks for bringing the forum back online and posting all the gory details about it

Backup drives have no need to be quick so they're probably high capacity non SSD drives in a raid 1. And because they're much larger capacity than the active SSD raid array, they can contain multiple, historical backups of the same databases. At least, that's how I'd do it on a budget. Probably some periodical backups moved elsewhere as well.

What happens if you keep the backup on a ssd too and that ssd also gets corrupted?
Will this lead to the entire forum getting wiped out?

Depends on the controller and the age of the firmware whether you can see true SMART stats from the drives or even they're masked. My SSD's raid array (gen 1 X25-Ms) gives me goop as SMART readings which I know are false.

I was on the road when this happened. As I came to see my post. I saw 9 of my posts vanished. But then I saw this post. Glad the the site is back online.

You need to read theymos' post more carefully.