And the stuff RedHat wants to replace btrfs with sounds ridiculous. A rickety pile of LVM thin provisioning with XFS, with daemons running that will hopefully catch low disk space conditions before the thin provisioning fails and resize the logical volume groups faster than the disk can write. As far as I’ve heard they make no guarantees about that. And oh yeah, also using LVM for RAID and for block checksums.
The whole thing sounded much worse than ZFS or btrfs to me. Like a giant pile of cards that rely on someone keeping the whole thing balanced on a fingertip.
I am just now moving data around to prepare for a btrfs pool of 6x4TB disks on RAID10. It will replace a 4x4Tb running ext4 under RAID 5. In the future I plan to add more 2x4TB for expansion.
I’ve given a lot of thought on running ZFS, but the expansion is really expensive going down this road. Mine is not an enterprise solution, but a nice cozy home server for backups and some little virtualization. I have no ECC memory, and I don’t plan to spend money on those. ZFS seems to me more reliable, but memory hungry and designed with the idea it will be used in enterprise setups. The home user enthusiast is not their priority, while BTRFS seems to me much more “home user” friendly.
I cannot understand RH pushing for LVM and XFS, they may have good reasons, I just cannot see those.
I’ve also considered UNRAID, but I choose to keep it running on linux directly to get some learning. I can tell that it is a nice experience learning this stuff. But I could not find a good consistent consolidate documentation on BTRFS for noobies. It is all kind of scattered around the web. If any of you have a good “prime” on btrfs please point to it, I’d love to read it!
Another thing to mention here is that if you want to trade performance for simplicity and flexibility with btrfs, you can just to use the raid1 option for the file system. It’s not actually a mirror, it just makes sure you have two copies on separate disks, so you can use mismatched disks and so long as no disk is bigger than all the rest combined, you’ll have parity. I ran for quite a while that way with 2x2TB and a 1x4 TB.
Just as an update after a few months - I could not get a reliable btrfs setup. I do not know why but the FS kept giving me problems. I ended up with ZFS on a very basic Zpool setup and a constant reminder that hoarding data has a cost, so housekeeping is always in order. The ZFS config was actually easier than keeping the data hoarding tendency at bay.
Hey, great that you found a solution that works for you! If you want, I’d like to know what kind of problems we’re talking about? I run BTRFS RAID myself and don’t really have any problems right now.
