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Asking advice for home storage configuration (l.antiope.link)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all. I’m trying to choose a configuration for my home storage. Speed is not a priority, I want a balance of stability and performance. I was thinking of making a raid 6 array with an ext4 file system for 4 disks of 2 TB each. Asking for advice, will this configuration be optimal?

Note - I am going to make a raid array based on external usb drives, which I will plug into the orange pi

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[+] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

zfs is excellent. It's enterprise and designed to suit the whole "I've got 60 disks filling up a 4ru top loaded SAN. If we expand we have to buy another 60 disk expansion." and because of that it works perfectly for expansion. You don't make a single raidz holding 60 disks. You'd make them in groups of say 6 or 8 or 10. Whatever suits your needs for speeds and storage and resilience. When you expand you drop another while raidz into the pool. Maybe it's another 6 disks into the new storage shelf.

But since your article in 2016, the openZFS project has promised us individual raidz expanding: In 2021 the announcement: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/raidz-expansion-code-lands-in-openzfs-master/

In 2022 an update for feature design complete but no code: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/raid-z-expansion-feature-for-zfs/

The actual request is here: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022

And the last announcement update was in June 2033 in the leadership meeting recorded here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=2p32m-7FNpM

You might think this is slow and yeah it's snails pace. But it's not from lack of work it's really truely because it's part of the entire strategy of making sure zfs and every update and every feature is just as robust.

I'm a fan even having hardware fail and disks fail both in enterprise, and at home. Zfs import being so agnostic just pull in the pool doesn't matter if it was BSD or Linux.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I know there are issues with growing ZFS raidz. Gonna reconsider it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I would setup a zfs cluster. It is overkill but really cool.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sounds like a plan. Only optimal if you situation calls for it. Some things to keep in mind, are is software or hardware raid. Also, backups out of this setup would be good. I like snapshotting, so that might be something you might want to think bout.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Yeah, i am going to use off-site backup as well. Is snapshotting a thing in ext4 setup? don't wanna go with btrfs, i heard that raid 6 with it goes bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Oh, found out that I can use LVM for taking ext4 snapshots!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah I've used lvm with snapshotting with great success. Raid is great, just remember it is only one measure for data retention. Another optional addition would be add a hot spare.