What is the alternative to raid56? ZFS supported in future?

[Hooverdan (Dan W.)]

@dzmaster welcome to the Rockstor community.

RAID 5/6 is still supported, just not recommended, and now you have to jump through a couple of hoops to enable it.

For reference, you can read through this thread, where @philip outlines the options a bit more:

Disk unmounted data still there

Hello All, I setup a rockstor sever yesterday and ran into an issue.my disks are there but the shares are not mounted. I was in the process of doing a backup when I saw that the pool was a single array of three drives so I coverted it to raid 5 and waited maybe 2 or 2.5 hours for the 500gb of data to be figure out then rebooted and now the shares are not mounted. anyway love the software and hopeful this is recoverable. Thanks Paul

btrfs itself recommends RAID1c3 as a possible replacement for RAID6 with the space caveat:

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mkfs.btrfs.html#profiles

Note 4: Since kernel 5.5 it’s possible to use RAID1C3 as replacement for RAID6, higher space cost but reliable.

The entire concept of the Rockstor appliance is built on btrfs, rather than being a NAS appliance under which you’d manage “any type” of filesystem/RAID approach. So, the likelihood of supporting ZFS as the NAS filesystem is probably nil.

There continues to be some movement on the RAID5/6 space in development, but since that has been going on for a number of years, it might take another couple of years for it to be determined to be stable/OK.

Of course, as seen on some other discussions on this forum, the risk of RAID5/6 diminishes both based on use case (e.g. mostly read operations like on a media server with more sparse write activities) and setup (e.g. having a UPS to ensure clean shutdown). And, as always, the NAS itself will not be a replacement for good backups, but that is now more of a philosophical debate than a technical one.