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.

  • notagoblin@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I built a franken-server from some bits awhile ago using old disks of different sizes.

    The disks were formatted individually with BTRFS (Mostly any FS would do) and then a mergerfs pool setup across all the drives. I got full use of all my old drives. Sizes varied between 1TB and 6TB, gave me 20Tb of usable space.

    Mergerfs has no redundancy and no parity although it is designed to work with snapraid.

    If a drive is lost only the data on that drive is lost, you just need to replace that one drive, the data on the other drives remains intact. The loss of a drive in a Raid0 or JBOD array, results in the loss of the whole array and all the data.

    Some sort of backup is probarbly appropriate.

    https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/latest/

    Might be worth a look.

    • Overspark@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I use mergerfs (and snapraid because I do care about my data and want parity) on ext4 formatted disks. This is a much better way to use your disks if you’re mostly just storing media. RAID is for mitigation of downtime after drive failure, not for joining a bunch of (differently sized?) disks into one pool if downtime isn’t really a problem.