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  • The only real issue I've had with Linux is trying to get my old Drobo 5C to work. (it's a self-managed dynamically adjustable/resizable raid array that just presents itself as a single 70tb usb hard disk. The company that made them dissolved a few years ago)

    It's formatted in ntfs and loaded with 25tb+ of data from when I ran windows primarily.

    It'll mount and work temporarily, but quickly stops responding, with anything that tries to access it frozen. Particularly docker containers.

    Then it'll drop into some internal data recovery routine (it's a 'black box' with very little user control, definitely wouldn't be my choice again, but here we are), refusing to interact with the attached system for half an hour or so. When it finally comes back, linux refuses to mount it. 'dirty filesystem', but ntfsfix won't touch it either. Off to windows and chkdsk, then rinse and repeat.

    I gave up when one of those attempts resulted in corrupt data (a bunch of mkvs that wouldn't play from the beginning, but would play if you skipped past the first second or two). I can't backup this data, (no alternative storage or funds to acquire it) so that was enough tempting fate.

    I ended up attaching it to an old windows laptop that's now dedicated to serving it via samba :(

    Really looking forward to setting up a proper raid array eventually, but till then I'm stuck with 11mbps. I'd love to rent storage temporarily so I can move the data and try a different fs on the drobo...

    • You could probably get a Gbit LAN USB card added to that so you could at least get 30MB out of the thing 🤷.

      • I'd need a windows system to put it in. The Drobo isn't upgradable beyond stuffing more drives in it, and the laptop is an old hp craptop...

        I've got a second desktop that's got usb3 (drobo is usb3), so that'd probably improve things, just not by a lot (pretty sure the slowdown is in the samba share, but I need to do more testing and see where exactly the issue is), and I kinda want to keep that system free for other experiments.

        Idk, still thinking on it.

        • Ah, if the thing has USB 3.0, then the NIC in the laptop is probably 100Mbit (lower end models had 100Mbit even if they were newer), that's your main issue, not SMB. SMB is a TCP/IP protocol, has nothing to do with hardware implementation and has no speed limits (at least none that I'm aware of). It goes as fast as the slowest part in the chain.

486 comments