I'm installing 3x2TB HDDs into my desktop pc. The drives are like-new.
Basically they will replace an ancient 2tb drive that is failing. The primary purpose will basically be data storage, media, torrents, and some games installed. Losing the drives to failure would not be catastrophic, just annoying.
So now I'm faced with how to set up these drives. I think I'd like to do a RAID to present the drives as one big volume. Here are my thoughts, and hopefully someone can help me make the right choice:
- RAID0: Would have been fine with the risk with 2 drives, but 3 drives seems like it's tempting fate. But it might be fine, anyhow.
- RAID1: Lose half the capacity, but pretty braindead setup. Left wondering why pick this over RAID10?
- RAID10: Lose half the capacity... left wondering why pick this over RAID1?
- RAID5: Write hole problem in event of sudden shutoff, but I'm not running a data center that needs high reliability. I should probably buy a UPS to mitigate power outages, anyway. Would the parity calculation and all that stuff make this option slow?
I've also rejected considering things like ZFS or mdadm, because I don't want to complicate my setup. Straight btrfs is straightforward.
I found this page where the person basically analyzed the performance of different RAID levels, but not with BTRFS. https://larryjordan.com/articles/real-world-speed-tests-for-different-hdd-raid-levels/ (PDF link with harder numbers in the post). So I'm not even sure if his analysis is at all helpful to me.
If anyone has thoughts on what RAID level is appropriate given my use-case, I'd love to hear it! Particularly if anyone knows about RAID1 vs RAID10 on btrfs.
I needed somewhere to plant files while I reconfigured my ZFS NAS from raidz1 to raidz2 and added an extra drive to compensate for the loss of space. Suprisingly I got away with it!
Mergerfs is quite useful. Now I have a lot of occasional spare storage and somewhere to put snapshots until I can save up for a proper backup drive.
I've tried Snapraid but we didn't get on, I never got the hang of it and lost data as a result.
I think you can use different size disks with ZFS if you use raid10 for the pairs, but the cost would be to high for me. Did I read somewhere that they were working on a way to use different size disks? That would be useful.
Just to add, I'd like BTRFS to be brilliant, so much interesting potential, but I read its deemed safer to use raid10 rather that any variant of raid5. if you're ever faced with having to rebuild the array, as others have mentioned. Single use is ok as far as I know.