this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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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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[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I understood that software raid on USB is dangerous as sometimes the drives can get offline for a few seconds due to current fluctuations and then will lose the sync. Maybe it's ok for files that don't get accessed too often, like video file backups

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

In my experience there are often issues with sata ssd over USB, but slower HDD seem to work fine. With btrfs I would set up a regular scrubbing job to find and fix possible data errors automatically.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

With btrfs I would set up a regular scrubbing job to find and fix possible data errors automatically.

This only works for minor errors caused by tiny physical changes. A buggy USB drive dropping out and losing writes it claimed to have written can kill a btrfs (sometimes unfixably so) especially in a multi-device scenario.

[–] mhz@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A buggy USB drive dropping out and losing writes it claimed to have written can kill a btrfs

Mixing USB and SATA drives sounds like a very bad idea, I'm holding on using an array of drives connected using USB. hank you for your comment

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

It's not the mixing that's bad, it's using USB in any kind of multi-device setup or even using USB drives for active workloads at all.

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