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 must log in or # to comment.
Personally I would go for ZFS with the SSD as a L2ARC. But among the options you listed I would do BTRFS RAID1 if you’re only gonna use two HDDs, and mdadm RAID5 with BTRFS on top if using three.
What are the advantages of this over mdadm raid and bcache?
L2ARC will kill a SSD faster than normal wear would.
It will yeah, although with modern SSDs it really isn’t a big problem. I’ve used an Samsung 840 EVO as L2ARC for 8 years now.
Btrfs still has some issues, but it’s not like it’s dangerous or anything.
Xfs is going to give more flexibility for managing volumes, better performance than ext4 across multiple disks, and more fault protection.
Ext4 doesn’t really have any benefits in this race but being stable I suppose. An argument could be made it might be slightly faster under LUKS.
Zfs is more complex, but a bit more flexible than XFS, has CoW, snapshots, built in encryption and dynamic storage allocation.
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.
The man page at https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mkfs.btrfs.html says:
RAID5/6 has known problems and should not be used in production.
So those profiles have unknown, unspecified problems.
But btrfs is safe on top of md-based raid1/5/6. It also has the advantage that you only need to encrypt one volume.
Could you elaborate on btrfs on top of md raid?
This one seems the most likely solution for me.
Are there some advantages of btrfs over raid? I understand how raid works but btrfs for redundancy is foreign to me.
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.
I use BTRFS for snapshots, and auto compression. Maybe it can be done with raids with LVM? AFAIK BTRFS redundancy is basically the same as traditional RAID, similar to using mdadm. Still, you would want a backup strat instead relying on the disk redundancy. I learn that the hardway.
I would absolutely recommend a file system with snapshot capabilities for a home server. One of btrfs mirror, dm-raid (raid5) with btrfs, or zfs would work. The practical differences would be negligible at this scale and you can just pick whatever you fancy.
The BTRFS thing is cutting the power or losing the disks in the middle of a write which corrupts your data. If you don’t think that will be a problem then BTRFS is fine. I recommend ZFS personally, but it sounds like you want to use mdadm instead so basically anything will work.
If you might need to shrink your filesystem later then avoid XFS. EXT4 is relatively featureless but ol’ reliable. ZFS is good for long term data integrity and protection. BTRFS is similar to ZFS. BcacheFS is new but like a swirl of EXT4 and BTRFS. Just pick the one with the features you want.
Powerloss might happen as I don’t have a ups.
And when it comes to mdadm, it just happens to be the first and only redundancy tool I know. I am however open to learn and try new things.
ZFS seems interesting, but: I read that ZFS would require quite a lot of RAM, and I was going for 32 GBs only, would it be enough?
ZFS for it all and maybe btrfs if you are ok with its limitations
