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As lovely as 3x20TB RAID sounds, RAID on btrfs is never a particularly good idea. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#Multi-device_file_sys...



Don't overdramatize, the link doesn't suppport "never". RAID 5 or 6 is not a good idea.

RAID 1 or 0 is just as a good idea as ever.


Not sure if I agree with you on RAID 0, but RAID 1 certainly is, and that's indeed what I'm running.

The 3x20TB btrfs setup I mentioned is configured with RAID1C3 for metadata, and RAID1 for data, and works just fine with even or odd number of drives.

It's funny how people assumed RAID5 when they saw 3 drives.

I switched to this after years of running on ZFS, and for my workloads btrfs is faster on Linux (not to mention the licensing/packaging mess).


I never said RAID0 was a good idea, just that it's as good as it ever was :P


Makes sense. I should have read your comment more carefully! :)


While BTRFS' RAID has issue, BTRFS on RAID can be done.

I do something like this, https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/What_was_the_RAID...

Basically, mdadm, then on top, format with BTRFS


After 17 years of existance one would assume they have fixed all major flaws. Anyone knows why raid is still broken on btrfs? And what is the next fs after zfs and btrfs? There should be a major contender by now, but I see none.


I believe the recommendation is to run btrfs on top of mdraid, which works fine. Meta is said to use btrfs, but apparently they don't care about the raid implementation, so there's nobody paying for that development.

OpenZFS works fine, but it can be tricky to install due to the license thing, not all distributions support it in their installer.

Bcachefs is said to be the up and coming contender for both, but it was merged to the mainline kernel in January, so probably at the moment it is tricky to install as well. I would think many of this year's distribution releases will make it available.


IMO the "next fs" is just zfs. They somewhat recently merged RAIDZ expansion feature https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/12225 and make regular improvements. If no file system has what you need today, zfs will probably be the first one to have it "tomorrow," imo.


> Anyone knows why raid is still broken on btrfs?

For all the talk about the raid5/6 issues on btrfs, people don't seem motivated enough to actually spend time fixing this. It's almost as if mdadm was enough and there wasn't that much drive to make it happen.

> And what is the next fs after zfs and btrfs?

http://bcachefs.org/


Raid 5/6 should not be used. Other levels work just fine. This is not a raid-in-general problem.




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