I’m building a new NAS for home use. It will primarily be used for media storage, media streaming, backups, and some database use. Read speed is more important than write speed at this time.
The biggest draw to Rockstor and BTRFS is the ability to resize a pool adding 1 or 2 disks at a time. At first glance, a solution such as RAID5 or RAID6 would be best, but I realize they are unstable now. I’d like to maintain some data protection ability, without the need for an off site backup (my data isn’t that important).
With that in mind, I’m wondering what pool setup would you suggest? I’d like to start with 10TB usable but realize I will need to grow in the future.
If I did RAID 10, can I add 2 disks at a time to increase the size of the usable pool? Should I just go for RAID 6?
Thanks in advance, and thanks to @suman for recommending me to the forum.
I have a few RAID10 and RAID1 pools that I use pretty much for production. For example, this forum lives on a RAID10 pool. I do use RAID5/6 but the general consensus is that it’s still a bit rough. We are looking forward to testing and sharing results soon(perhaps after 4.2 kernel update)
You can setup SMART monitoring, but regardless of which raid level you choose for the pool, with current version(3.8-4) of Rockstor, you are mostly on your own when a drive fails. But we’ll close that gap in the next few releases so you can receive alerts and other help with recovering from drive failures.
There are other heavy users of Rockstor and BTRFS on the forum and I hope you’ll get more data from them as well. My recommendation is to go with RAID 10 and convert to RAID5/6 at a later time.
Thanks @suman. I am wondering though. If I start with 8x2TB in a pool, in a RAID 10 config, so 8TB usable, can I grow this pool by adding 2 more 2TB drives? Can I grow it with any 2 similar sized drives? e.g. 2 3TB drives?
Knowing that I can move toward RAID 6 later and further expand my capacity is very reassuring as well. Thanks!
@AdamC You can add 2TB or 3TB drives to grow your RAID10 pool. Note that while this is possible by running a few btrfs commands yourself, currently it’s not supported using the web-ui because back when we added pool resize support, btrfs behavior was inconsistent. But thanks to you, I’ve tested the behavior again today and everything worked. I am looking forward to adding support soon as part of this issue.