this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
46 points (96.0% liked)
Linux
60406 readers
369 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.
ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.
If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.
Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.
Thx.
The disks are only meant for transport at this time.
The more I think about it, the more I lean towards btrfs, because even if they don't use btrfs on the target server the copying process will do the error correction based on the checksums in btrfs itself. I hope btrfs does it the same way as ZFS in this scenario.
It’s a good idea to use what you know. I don’t have much experience with btrfs but if it does what it says on the tin then it should be safe to use.
Copying the contents at the target is a good strategy. If the drives are to be put into 27/7 use later I would probably consider wiping them and run an integrity test before putting them to use, as once they start being used it will be too late (and stay as a doubt in the back of my mind).
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?
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.
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.