Evening All,
I am looking for some advice surrounding having RAID 1 on my Linux system and is it actually worth it anymore?.
The idea is I will have two of my SSDs running in RAID 1 together with BTRFS as a boot drive but I have heard some horror stories surrounding BTRFS and RAID, additionally I remember wendell saying RAID can be useless due to fake reporting.
What would you suggest? should I try RAID or just go with something like HBA.
Thanks
Anything I don’t want to lose I keep on my NAS running raid Z2, and anything I can’t afford to lose I also keep in an offsite backup. If you’re worried about your boot drive, I recommend incremental backup to a separate device like a NAS. I’ve seen a bad power supply take every drive in a system with it when it dies.
so HBA and JBOD then offload to NAS?
Hardware RAID is dead. Next gen file systems, or go home.
Best case scenario, you’ve got a NAS at home where you can ship your important data off to. However, not everyone has this. If your desktop is where your important data lives, by all means, mirror that shit up. Use BTRFS or ZFS (preferably ZFS, but I am biased, check your distro’s support of ZFS vs BTRFS for more information) for the mirroring and the data protection.
If you get an LSI RAID controller, you can flash it to IT mode, and the BTRFS/ZFS will be fine working with the disks attached to it. Alternatively if your motherboard has enough ports on it, that’ll work too.
What you choose to do depends on how important your data is to you. In my main system I have an SSD boot drive and a spinning rust storage drive. Neither of these drives are mirrored in the same system. The ssd is backed up in full to my nas, and certain folders on my storage drive are also mirrored in full on the nas. My server is basically a playground I use for development so i don’t bother backing any of it up since it could be recreated in a couple of hours.
I agree with Levitance on ZFS, it’s the main reason I built a system to run FreeNAS. If it looks like something you’re interested in the FreeNAS forums have a lot more information than I would be able to give you. I can’t really comment on BTRFS as I have no experience using it.
Edit: If you’re mostly worried about downtime I could see mirroring your boot drive. It’s not something I worry about but I can understand that viewpoint.