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Seeking advice about BTRFS RAID (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by mhz@lemm.ee to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi, I got a tiny Lenovo M720Q (i5-8400T / 8RAM / 128NVME / 1Tb 2,5" HDD) that I want to set as my home server with the ability to add 2 more drives (for RAID5 if possible) later using its two USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10gbps).

  • The OS (debian 12 + docker) will be exclusive to the nvme, I will mostly use 40/128GB of its capacity with no idea how to make use of the rest.

  • My data (medias, documents and ISO files) will resides on the HDD pool, while keeping a copy of my docs on my home pc.

I read a bit about BTRFS RAID I even experimented with it in a VM and it really got me interested in using it because of its flexibility of balancing between raid levels and the hot swapping of unequally sized drives in both stripped and mirrored arrays. However, most of what I read online predate kernel 6,2 (which improved BTRFS RAID56 reliability). So, Here I am asking if anyone here is using BTRFS RAID and if it is stable enough to use on a mostly idle server or should I stick with LVM instead. What good practices to do or bad ones to avoid?

Thank you.

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[-] yote_zip@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago

You can also use MergerFS+SnapRAID over individual BTRFS disks which will give you a pseudo-RAID5/6 that is safe. You dedicate one or more disks to hold parity, and the rest will hold data. At a specified time interval, parity will be calculated by SnapRAID and stored on the parity disk (not realtime). MergerFS will scatter your files across the data disks without using striping, and present them under one mount point. Speed will be limited to the disk that has the file. Unmitigated failure of a disk will only lose the files that were assigned to that disk, due to lack of striping. Disks can be pulled and plugged in elsewhere to access the files they are responsible for.

It's a bit of a weird-feeling solution if you're used to traditional RAID but it's very flexible because you can add and remove disks and they can be any size, as long as your parity disks are the largest.

this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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