Normally I would say software, or rather a raid-like filesystem like btrfs or ZFS. But in your specific case of funneleing it all through a single usb-c connection it is probably better to keep using an external box that handles it all internally.
That said, the CPU load of software raid it very small, so that isn't really something to be concerned with, but usb connections are quite unstable and not good for directly connecting drives in a raid.
I mean I've been running the setup this way for >4 years and never had any problem with the USB connection, so I cannot attest to "usb connections are quite unstable"...
I supposed that is because the JBOD box was handling the raid internally so short connection issues are not that problematic and can be recovered from automatically. But that wouldn't be the case if you connected everything together with a usb hub and usb to sata adapters and run a software raid on that.
I've been running a 4-disk RAIDz1 on USB for 4 years now with zero failures on one machine and one failure on another where it turned out the USB controller in one WD Elements was overheating. Adhering a small heatsink on it resolved the problem and it's been stable under load for 2 years now. The USB devices have to be decent. AMD's host controllers are okay. VIA hubs are okay. ASMedia USB-to-SATA are okay. I'm using some enclosures with ASMedia and some off-the-shelf WD Elements that also use ASMedia. It's likely easier to get a reliable system if installing disks internally as the PSU and interconnects are much more regulated and any would work well, whereas with USB you have to be careful in selecting decent components.
just my 2 cents, if youre going to do raid, buy a thing that will do it...
a nas or enclosure where the hardware does all the heavy lifting.
do not build raided system from a bunch of disks... i have had, and have had friends have many failures over the years from those home brew raids failing in one way or another and its usually the software that causes the raid to go sideways.. mayvbe shits better today than it was 10-20 years ago.
its just off my list. i bought a bunch of cheap nas devices that handle the raid, and then i mirror those devices for redundancy.
Y'all must be doing something wrong because HW raid has been hot garbage for at least 20years. I've been using software raid (mdadm, ZFS) since before 2000 and have never had a problem that could be attributed to the software raid itself, while I've had all kinds of horrible things go wrong with HW raid. And that holds true not just at home but professionally with enterprise level systems as a SysAdmin.
With the exception of the (now rare) bare metal windows server, or the most basic boot drive mirroring for VMware (with important datastores on NAS/SAN which are using software raid underneath, with at most some limited HW assisted accelerators) , hardly anyone has trusted hardware raid for decades.
Y’all must’ve been doing something wrong with your hardware raid to have so many problems. Anecdotally, as an admin for 20+ years, I’ve never had a significant issue with hardware raid. The exception might be the Sun 3500 arrays. Those were such a problem and we had dozens of them.
So what were you doing wrong to have so much trouble with the Sun 3500's?
They were olde by the time I got to administer them and they were failing every so often. They were a pain to work with as I recall, but again no lost data. They would beep with no issues sometimes. One thing that wasn’t their fault was a previous admin had set them up in threes with all but one disk in a raid5 array. They were wondering why performance was crap and one array would just drop every week like clockwork.
Took a while, but I mirrored (VVM) the data off on spare 3500s set up properly. They ran okay then. It was just ancient storage. Glad to work on netapps now. So much smoother and sophisticated storage compared to the olden days. lol
In principle each instance could keep a running total to be added to the global total.
Consider the purpose of the votes: it’s a popularity contest for ranking within a timeline. Does the community on instance X want their timeine rankings to be influenced by votes by instance Y (which could even be prone to shenanigans)? A tiny instance might want external votes, in which case it should ask other instances what their totals are. But if an instance reaches a certain amount of activity, then external votes are actually pollution that makes scores less accurate/relevant with respect to the views of that particular community. E.g. the solar punk instance does not benefit from votes of those on a right-wing instance like hexbear.
@BentiGorlich I personally want upvotes and downvotes of threads posts to be public to everyone on every instance, and count of favourites of microblog posts to be public only to followers.
this is it exactly. the software should implement all the protocl pieces, and allow local admins to decide not only what is shown, but what is federated.
devs shouldnt be making that call.
i think up/down counts will start to make sense when people further understand the nature of the systems they are logging into. i would prefer not to create a technological solution to that ignorance.
and although its extremely unpopular, if we want reddit-like volumes of users were going to have to think about reputation points/karma. i think i just felt lemmy.world shudder
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