My life is generally Mac and Thunderbolt centric and I’m trying to bring it into the Linux world. The work flow on the Mac goes immediate storage goes onto a 2TB external NVME, then to one of the two drive 4TB drives on my OWC open dock, then moves into a 16TB soft RAID array, and backup is on a 16TB HW raid all are thunderbolt enclosures. The issue I have is that mdam doesn’t work on either my Trixie or 26.04 install so I can’t convert my existing soft RAID to anything readable.

Does anyone know of a 8 bay preferably thunderbolt hardware RAID enclosure that isnt’t 1000 dollars?

  • Lemmchen@feddit.orgEnglish
    1·
    13 hours ago

    You miiight be able to recover the array if you’re lucky

    I don’t see how this would apply. Having the disks connected externally is the same as having them connected internally, maybe over a different bus/protocol, but the principle is the same. No RAID solution I know of would lose the array on a power outage (AFAIK).

    the problem is the target not being able to manage its own interrupt

    Honestly I don’t see how interrupt handling would be any different between internally or externally connected devives, except for different buses/protocols handling it differently intrinsicly. Are you absolutely sure this is a thing or are you just speculating?

    you have two different states

    Maybe I’m too spolied by using ZFS, but again I don’t think this would actually be a problem. But AFAICT you don’t even need a CoW filesystem for that to be not a problem. Every journaling filesystem (e.g. ext4) would solve this by dismissing the newest non-consistent data and restore a working state.

    I mean, there are 60-bay 19" expansion units for enterprise storage systems. I doubt these would be a thing if having the drives connected externally was a problem.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 hours ago

      Having the disks connected externally is the same as having them connected internally

      No, it 1000% is not, especially in the case of USB that I used. Even in the way Linux handles everything as a file and target, it is vastly different.

      No RAID solution I know of would lose the array on a power outage

      Hardware RAID enclosures have batteries on the disk controllers for this very reason. We aren’t talking about those though, we’re talking about software RAID on JBOD, which wouldn’t have those sanity protections. Here’s some random blog explaining deeper.

      Honestly I don’t see how interrupt handling would be any different between internally or externally connected devives, except for different buses/protocols handling it differently intrinsicly

      See above

      Maybe I’m too spolied by using ZFS, but again I don’t think this would actually be a problem

      That’s a filesystem solution to a hardware problem, so yes, probably a bit spoiled there, or at least it’s skewing your understanding of what RAID is and how it works. One of the reasons ZFS exists, actually. It’s nice to have nice things though.