this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
20 points (95.5% liked)

Selfhosted

40474 readers
381 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I am planning on creating a home server with either 2 (RAID1) or 3 (RAID5) HDDs as bulk storage and 1 SSD as bcache.

The question is, what file system should I use for the HDDs? I am thinking of ext4 or xfs, as I heard btrfs is not recommended for my use case for some reason.

Do you all have some advice to give on what file system to use, as well as some other tips?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (11 children)

I would just skip RAID, add all disk to a single BTRFS and use the built in profiles for (meta)data redundancy.

Cache I don't know much tho.

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-device.html

[–] Svinhufvud@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Are there some advantages of btrfs over raid? I understand how raid works but btrfs for redundancy is foreign to me.

[–] CondorWonder@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 weeks ago

BTRFS has RAID built into the file system - instead of using MD you use BTRFS profiles which tell the system how to handle data.

For instance

  • file system data (critical for the file system to function): raid1c3 which means 3 copies of core P file system data on 3 different devices
  • user data: raid1 (so duplicating all your data on two different devices)

With this set up you could lose one device (of n, the total doesn’t matter), and not lose any data, and still be able to boot to recover with too much hassle.

BTRFS does block checksums, can scan for bit rot and recover from it, and generally tries to make your data safe. It technically supports raid5/6 for user data, the issue is around unclean shutdowns and a potential write hole where you could lose data, but if your system has a UPS backup and is on a relatively recent kernel it’s not any more dangerous than MD raid5/6 as I understand it.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)