At this year’s MeetBSD, Joshua Paetzel, a core member of the FreeNAS Development Team, demonstrated the failover capabilities of FreeNAS… by pulling the drives out of two FreeNAS Minis and completely destroying them. 
Josh ran a build mounted from two FreeNAS Minis populated by four drives each. The compiler was projected on a screen so attendees could see when the build stopped running. Volunteers were then invited to pull out a HDD at random from either of the FreeNAS boxes and destroy them using a selection of tools including a hammer, vice, screwdriver, and tesla coil. Some of the people who gleefully stepped up to participate include:
- Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of FreeBSD, CTO of iXsystems
- Kirk McKusick, early developer of BSD, inventor of the Berkeley Fast File System
- Alfred Perlstein, Sr. Director, Appliance & Kernel Engineering, Norse
- George Kola, CTO, Voxer
- Devin Teske, FreeBSD Developer
What was the magic number of drives that had to be destroyed before failover on FreeNAS stopped working? Watch the video to find out: