ZFS is great. We hear it all the time, but you hope you will never need to utilize any of it’s advanced data-protecting features. I recently went through a series of events which makes me truly grateful for ZFS. This is a real world example that would have gone horribly different if I wasn’t using ZFS. It’s […]

Yesterday I assembled a new ZFS array. It’s a 7x 1TB SATA RAID-Z1 array. Having to replace a failed drive within the first hour of the array’s life, I decided adding a hot spare would be a good idea. After installing it in the server (hotplugging) I checked with dmesg that it was detected as […]

I woke up this morning and what do you know, one of my RAID arrays in my workstation was degraded. Just great. This particular array was made up of 3x 1TB disks in RAID level 5 running on an Intel RST fakeRAID controller. After Ubuntu had some serious difficulty communicating with the drive on bootup, […]

I recently purchased an Intel SASWT4I RAID controller. First of all, it is indeed a hardware RAID solution, so it is operating system independent. This is crucial as my workstation is dual-booted with Windows and Ubuntu. I have the ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard and in the setup of the card, I had some issues. The motherboard would not […]

A filesystem in the most simple terms is a hierarchy of how the information is stored on computer storage media such as hard drives, SSDs and RAID arrays. Many people don’t think that filesystems pose a significant impact on the performance of a system and therefore do not think much of them. In fact, most end users […]

HDD, SSD – What? A hard drive (HDD) is a computer component that utilizes spinning magnetic disks (platters) and read/write heads to store information permanently. Hard drives are what is known as non-volatile storage, meaning that the information is retained after the power is removed, such as when you turn your computer off. Hard drives have […]