cross-posted from: https://l.antiope.link/post/43914

Hi all. I’m trying to choose a configuration for my home storage. Speed is not a priority, I want a balance of stability and performance. I was thinking of making a raid 6 array with an ext4 file system for 4 disks of 2 TB each. Asking for advice, will this configuration be optimal?

Note - I am going to make a raid array based on external usb drives, which I will plug into the orange pi

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    1 year ago

    Yes very much so. You’ll need to figure out what your strategy is for array growth before you start building, because ZFS is very inflexible when growing. I normally just use mirrors because you can add 2 disks at a time with no hassles or gotchas. If you use a RAIDZ variant you will basically have to destruct and rebuild the pool/vdev if you want to grow them (or buy a whole bunch of new disks to start a separate RAIDZ array). The only other option is to replace every single disk in the RAIDZ with a larger capacity, which also works. RAIDZ expansion as a feature has been promised for many years (and the code is even already written!) but so far it has not been mainlined and although the current plan is to expect it sometime in the next year or so, that has also been the plan for the past 3-5 years. If you want to count on this feature being implemented by the time you want to grow you can feel free to do so, but it’s not something I would count on until it’s there.