Referencing: https://lemmy.world/post/17588348

I want to make a NAS with a 500GB boot drive and 2x16TB HDDs. Based on my previous post, btrfs is a good option. It also looks easy to get started. My plan for the NAS would be to purchase several 16TB drives, and only use 2 of them.

My first question is about different drives. Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs? (I assume yes)

2nd question: how does the replacement process go? Like if drive A died, so I remove it, and put a brand new replacement in. What do I have to do with btrfs to get the raid 1 back going? Any links or guides would be amazing.

  • eco_game@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs?

    I don’t quite remember the source for this, but I believe I read some time ago that it’s actually a good thing to have separate drives. The reasoning is, if you buy two identical drives (at the same time), the likelyhood of both drives failing around the same time is severely higher.

    This is then amplified by the fact that rebuilding a RAID puts a lot of strain on the non-dead drive, so if ie. drive 1 dies and drive 2 is about to die, the strain you put on drive 2 in order to rebuild your RAID onto drive 3 might kill drive 2 before you even finish rebuilding your RAID.

    Again, this is just from my memory, it might be worth doing some more research on.

    • mal3oon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      if you buy two identical drives (at the same time), the likelyhood of both drives failing around the same time is severely higher.

      I need sources, this sounds extremely unlikely. That’s basically 2 "independent” probabilities.

    • WbrJr@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I have read the same, but also read it is not very true anymore, specially with dedicated server drives. I would not worried too much about it honestly

  • theit8514@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    In days past some drive vendors had different sector layouts for drives and would cause issues with raid. Pretty sure most nowadays are all the same layout and you won’t run into any issues. I still look to get the same drive model anyways just to be perfectly sure that there are no issues.

    Even then you may run into weird issues like one of my 1.2 TB enterprise ssd drives was reporting 1.12 TiB rather than 1.09 TiB the other 7 drives had. TrueNas refused to build a vdev with that drive and I had to return it to get a new one.

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    33·
    1 year ago

    Is btrfs RAID stable yet? This article is three years old, so maybe things have improved, but it contains some pretty strong warnings about the dangers of btrfs RAID:

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/

    To summarize, the article argues that btrfs is great for single-disk usage but its RAID implementations are idiosyncratic and unreliable.

    (I use btrfs daily on several single-disk computers and it has been great, but I have never tried its RAID.)