I’m new to Rockstor and I am trying to understand a few things.
Can the latest build do the following?
iSCSI
NFS
Encryption
Can you grow existing volumes just by adding disks or is it like zfs where you need to add a whole new vdev or replace all disks at once?
Can it do raid5/6?
I’m trying to decide what to use on a nas I plan on building and comparing this to freenas, as I’m sure a lot of people do.
@csmall Welcome to the Rockstor community.
iSCSI - No
NFS - Yes
Encryption - Yes (via Full disk LUKS)
Yes. And you can also shrink them if need be by the same means. Oh and change their raid level, all whilst using them.
Yes but btrfs 5/6 levels (the parity raid levels) are not recommended or encouraged in btrfs, and our UI also has this warning.
You might find our official docs of interest, some of it is a little out of date but there’s also a fair bit of new stuff there.
http://rockstor.com/docs/
Hope that helps.
Thank you, I will check out the documentation.
If parity raid levels are generally not working well or not suggested, what is protecting the array/volume/data from failure/loss etc…
Aside from a backup; one of the non parity raid levels, ie:
btrfs raid1 (2 copies on 2 different devices) min drive count 2.
or
btrfs raid10 (raid1 with striping for performance) min drive count 4.
Both levels effectively have single disk failure robustness:
see: Redundancy profiles in the Pools section of the docs.
Note that currently btrfs is only 2 way in non parity raid levels so irrespective of how many disks you have only 2 copies of the data / metadata will be made, but they have to be on any 2 different devices (for raid1/10). With btrfs the raid levels are at the block/chunk level not the device level, but are device aware in order to duplicate appropriately given the btrfs raid level used.
Hope that helps.
what is protecting the array/volume/data from failure/loss etc…
I can vouch for RAID0 with regular btrfs sends to a second (offsite) rockstor. Resilience with the performance benefits of striping.
Nope 2 x RAID0 with btrfs send/receive between them. Better than RAID10 because one is offsite.
