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 Post subject: Fav Logical SW. Fav RAID ID App. Write block app? More!
PostPosted: November 11th, 2018, 14:11 
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Joined: March 20th, 2018, 7:55
Posts: 124
Location: Los Angeles
For logical recovery, I presume R-TT is the winner...
And Disagreements?

Amongst Sys-Dev Labs
- which product(s) do you feel is best?


Which program identifies a RAID layout the best?
(...or is this just a manual skill that should be cultivated?)


Cloning a healthy drive (OS-independent...)
- I.e., DDRescue seems best for -free- if you're comfortable with linux
- For cloning... Win10? from spinning to ssd (even if they differ in size but fit the GB used?)
- Is there a scenario in which HDD SuperClone wins?

Of course I use hardware imaging equipment - but when duplicating many raid drives, it'd still be nice to be able to clone 8 drives, simultaneously on two computers in under 1 day, for less than the cost of a single DDI4 -- so, we tried something out, and were able to get it done with inexpensive equipment...

Cloning 32TB in 17hrs on 2 machines which cost $300 ea... was cool!
- Dual, hot swappable PSUs
- 8 LFF slots
- Each slot compatible with BOTH: SATA & SAS drives.


Hardware I used - What I still want, How I'd shop to buy these items:

Below is these HW I have, am setting up, need to do with it, and the other things I want ...


4x Dell T320 -- STANDARD CONFIGURATION
ESXi: - Win10 - Win7 - Ubuntu
• R-Studio, UFS Pro, &
• 8 LFF drive slots (T830 / T840 as prices down (with 18 LFF, dual SP CPUs, +more PCI slots
• Removed the Dell PERC (RAID only)
• Install standard HBA
• SFP+ with 10GbE & SFP28 (peer to peer until SFP28 switches become affordable).
• QSFP 40GbE operates at a dB that'll drive you insane; peer to peer!! :)
• Again, QSFP+ can be used for peer to peer as the city
• USB 3.1 gen2 (when local transfers are possible/necessary)

~ UNIT cost, CONFIGURED: < $1,000 ea Excluding SW licensing.
....
** TASKS REMAINING **
• Getting USB 3.1 Gen2 working in all OS's
• Getting SFP+ (pref SFP28) working in all OS's
• Finding the optimal PCIe SFP28 mfr. so all the networking is reliable and OS-compatible.
**I'm new to SFP+. Though I have assistance, I prefer to minimize dependency**


Remaining T320
• 8x LFF HDD slots (compatible with both) -- used with 8x SAS drives (reliability)
• SAS offers higher reliability - and versatility allows you to get the BEST deals
• SAS, is ideal to use as 'processing targets' -and- safely store data awaiting customer's container.
• SAS are excellent "Target," logical processing, temp storage for recoveries.
• They are made to higher standards -- for less.
• Also remain cognizant that NVMe drives consume 4x the PCI slots - yet SAS3 is 2x SATA3 bandwidth

ADVANTAGES
• The setup'll simultaneously clone ≤4 HDD's, (2.5/3.5) PER machine (via DDRescue etc)

• ESXi - VMs running linux (imaging job) - concurrently imaging via DOS for DDI4. AND Atola...
• While processing RAID analysis in another window, and performing a Logical Recovery in another.
• Physical "target" space may be moot; with 2x 10GbE ports and 2x USB 3.1gen2 ... xfer = non-issue.

WITH MEMORY ISOLATION, EXTREME CASES ARE POSSIBLE

To copy up to 4 drives x machine = 8x 4TB (full images) in 17 hours via ddrescue via 4 CLI windows:
32TB copied within 17 hours. and could have done 48TB.

I see NO reason, and it's perhaps PLAUSIBLE to run additional tasks in other VMs simultaneously:
- DDI4 via it's DOS with dedicated access to it's card. (PCI slots dependent0
- Atola (this one is almost obviously - so long as no conflicting versions of .NET are installed.
- Maybe even ... PC-3000; (with sufficient & INSULATED... RAM) & ... an available PCI slot.
- Logical image-processing, based on RAM & CPU resources of course.

WHY do this?
• Some people are constrained by the cost of imaging / recovery systems.
• Some people are constrained by access to quality help, knowledge, or advertising.
• Some people are bursting at the seems, with insufficient ROOM for equipment, etc.

THERE ARE ALWAYS SCALABILITY FUNCTIONS IN BUSINESSES.
- Where land is cheap, it's clients with the budget.
- Were rent is high, it's your competition, reputation, success rate, & economy of space.

- I like the idea of a computer's resources being the limiting function; not something arbitrary.
- Additionally, I regard enterprise grade construction that's cheap and versatile SAS/SATA great!
- The dual CPU configuration's even better you'd have many PCI slots...
- Even subtle things like iDRAC features.
- General build quality (cables) and the rarity of crashes.


The 4th Dell T320 is a ZFS -- RAIDZ2
• Setup with ESXi to run FreeNAS (unless I see good reason to switch to linux + ZFS) ...
• 96GB DDR3
• 8x 10TB IBM-HGST (NEW - SAS drives)
• Formatted ~ 55TB of space for storage (This could be 80TB after compression)
• Compression - enabled; auto skips when ineffective & maximized where the?. So far,
• Protected by [double parity]
• SFP28 PCI card.
• Buy SFP28 / QSFP100 switch when I can afford one; til then? peer to peer it is.


More on this subject elsewhere, maybe the lounge -- as this is already drifted afar.


if anyone gives a darn, lemme know, and i'll follow up on what works. i know computers are cheap. but in some areas, you don't have unlimited space for stuff ... and in scalability, to grow, means to assume substantially more liability (5 yr lease for twice as much with more employees, etc.) all because you were a little too big for a place. This is what makes efficiency so important in high rent areas....


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 Post subject: Re: Fav Logical SW. Fav RAID ID App. Write block app? More!
PostPosted: November 11th, 2018, 21:50 
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Joined: January 29th, 2012, 1:43
Posts: 982
Location: United States
Quote:
Cloning a healthy drive (OS-independent...)
- I.e., DDRescue seems best for -free- if you're comfortable with linux
- For cloning... Win10? from spinning to ssd (even if they differ in size but fit the GB used?)
- Is there a scenario in which HDD SuperClone wins?

For cloning healthy drives, I cannot say that HDDSuperClone has any benefit over ddrescue, or any other software. It is designed to work with failing drives, not for optimum speed. If you asked about cloning failing drives, I could give you reasons why it is better.

_________________
http://www.hddsuperclone.com
Home of HDDSuperClone


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 Post subject: Re: Fav Logical SW. Fav RAID ID App. Write block app? More!
PostPosted: November 13th, 2018, 0:16 
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Joined: March 20th, 2018, 7:55
Posts: 124
Location: Los Angeles
I don't mean this to generate sparks ... I really don't know much about the application, and find it very interesting, but have so much to learn that I haven't been able to devote time specifically to this app/eco-system. In the interest of speeding me through figuring out 'how it solves "pain" I have which I lack other solutions for, would you be willing to answer some questions -- that I merely mean to economically give me some insight?

Thanks!

I'd be most grateful for "a CONTRAST list" re: HDDSuperClone / HDDSuperTool?

Features HDDSuper* has which are superior to or non-existent in:
DDRescue / other free programs:
Most dedicated hardware devices such as:
Features HDDSuper* plans as future feature sets?
Features unavailable in HDDSuper* because they're widely available elsewhere:
Doesn't presently offer, and may never offer as it's likely only expensive hardware can perform:
Has attempted but has yet to reach the reliability or performance on par with_____:


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 Post subject: Re: Fav Logical SW. Fav RAID ID App. Write block app? More!
PostPosted: November 13th, 2018, 18:43 
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Joined: January 29th, 2012, 1:43
Posts: 982
Location: United States
Here are the major capabilities. First I will compare the free version of HDDSuperClone to ddrescue.
1) The first noticeable difference is that HDDSuperClone has a GUI and ddrescue does not. The GUI can make it easier to work with.
2) HDDSuperClone has a better skipping algorithm that is self learning. It is designed to normally work best with the default settings. Ddrescue can need tweaking by the end user to get the best results.
3) When a drive becomes unresponsive, sometimes ddrescue is unable to detect that and reports all reads as errors. HDDSuperClone has more advanced ways of detecting if a drive is no longer responding, and will stop when detected.

Now for the paid Pro version of HDDSuperClone.
1) The pro version can perform soft and hard resets based on timeouts. This is a feature of the hardware based tools. HDDSuperClone Pro is the only software only tool that can do this. This is limited to drives that are directly connected to the computer as SATA or PATA (no hard reset for PATA). But this could never be run in a VM like the system you have described, the computer must be running Linux directly.
2) The pro version has the capability to control a relay to power cycle the drive if it locks up and becomes unresponsive.
3) The pro version has the ability to present the recovery as a virtual disk to the system, which allows the use of R-Studio (Linux licensed version) to perform data extraction without needing to clone the whole drive. DMDE can also be used, but R-Studio works better. Data extraction of this nature is a feature of many of the hardware tools.
4) I would like to think that the Pro version of HDDSuperClone could compete with the older DeepSpar DDI3, but for a fraction of the cost. Maybe someday someone with a DDI3 will do a comparison to prove that.
5) Most of the newer hardware tools can image by head, and perform other firmware fixes. HDDSuperClone cannot image by head, it must rely on a skipping algorithm. The only firmware fix that HDDSuperTool can to is to fix the slow issue on WD drives that are not SED locked. So for these things the hardware tools would win.

_________________
http://www.hddsuperclone.com
Home of HDDSuperClone


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