Setup RAIDZ on Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS

readme.md

Setup RAIDZ on Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS

In this walkthrough we'll be using 4 brand new Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB 7200rpm 256MB hard drives to setup a ZFS storage pool (RAIDZ 10).

1. ZFS

If you don't have ZFS already installed go ahead and run

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

2. Disk Identifier & Sector sizes

Before we do anything with the drives we need the disk identifier and sector size for each drive for step 3.

sudo fdisk -l

Output

Disk /dev/sda: 9.1 TiB, 10000831348736 bytes, 19532873728 sectors
Disk model: ST10000NE0008-2P
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

3. Badblocks

As a short summory what badblocks is:

Badblock command in Linux is used to search for bad blocks (block of memory which has been corrupted 
and can no longer be used reliably) in a device.

Set your disk sector size after -b and drive path after -sw. The drive is filled 4 times and verified 4 times before completion, keep in mind depending on your disk size the process time may differ.

sudo badblocks -b 4096 -sw /dev/sda

Output

Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x55: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0xff:  37.29% done, 60:39:34 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)

4. Setup alias for each drive

To bind your disks in a zfs pool it's a good idea to setup an alias for each drive Why?? If you replug your disks the Disk Identifier may change and problems may occur.

cd /dev/disk/by-id && ls

List disk that starts with ST1

ll ata-ST1* -ltr

Setup alias by serial number for each disk.

cd /etc/zfs/ && sudo nano vdev_id.conf

Example

alias 01    /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST10000NE0008-2P****
alias 02    /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST10000NE0008-2M****

After you save vdev_id.conf, reload udev.

sudo udevadm trigger

Check new disk aliases probably working.

cd /dev/disk/by-vdev && ll

5. Setup storage pool

Creating the RAID 10 pool, below the pool name is gitpool and disk 01 & 02 will be mirrored and same to 03 & 04 (if you run in to any issues add -f after create).

sudo zpool create gitpool mirror 01 02 mirror 03 04

Inspect your new pool

zpool status

or for more info do

zpool list -v

6. Setup lz4 compression

This will save a significant amount of disk space.

sudo zfs set compression=lz4 gitpool

To get the ratio on your pool

zfs get compressratio gitpool

Extra

I strongly recommend not dumping files in the root directory of your pool. Setup a nice folder structure.

sudo zfs create gitpool/data

Change directory ownership of you'r new pool (go to the root folder of your system).

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER gitpool/

Recover

If you run in to errors/health degraded without any data lost

sudo zpool list 

See status of pool(s).

sudo zpool status

Test the integrity of all files in your pool (can take a day or two depending on pool size)

sudo zpool scrub gitpool

and then

zpool clear gitpool