Tag: ZFS

The strange formatting of Oracle-branded HGST SSDs (WHL #71)

A little tale from the world of enterprise computing (again). Well, I needed something to do alongside filing my taxes, and I recently received a bunch of hardware, so there’s that.

I ordered, after long and unfruitful discussion and some eBay detour that also didn’t work because of, well, eBay, a couple of replacement hard disks of the spinning rust type, as well as SSDs to support them. The original ZFS RAID volume that kept *ALL* my data crashed via some obscure file system bug, and since I’m not a paying Oracle customer (not that they would help me out – everything is plastered with “restore from backup” notes), I finally migrated to Ubuntu and OpenZFS. […]


Random thoughts on Supermicro Risers, LSI LBAs, power supplies, ZFS and other fun server things (#P34)

With the failed 450W SFX power supply separated into a regular post last week, now’s the time to waffle on about what happened besides that.

Well, Solaris 11.4 (evil developer/home use licensing, so no current service packs) still uses minimal ashift as default instead of a fixed value of 12. ashift is the exponent of the power of 2 that is used as smallest assignable portion of data, so basically sector size. “Old” default is 9, as 2^9 is the well known 512 byte sector size that most old hard disks had as both logical and physical size, and which they reported as such. […]


Fractal Design Integra series 450W SFX power supply oopsie (WHL #63)

Someone missed posting two weeks ago and didn’t make up for it yet. That guy was me and here’s a two-part random collection on why that happened, what fun things I spent time with instead, and why hacking hardware sometimes sucks (a little). I’ll classify this one as regular post due to the power supply teardown, and the other one as a project, should be up by next Sunday.

Well, when I started gathering photos a fortnight ago to make a new post, my ZFS upgrade project (more on that in a minute) was finally going smoothly after a rocky start when creating the new zpool. […]