On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 2:45 PM John Mellor john.mellor@gmail.com wrote:
On 2023-03-01 3:01 p.m., Ranjan Maitra wrote:
I would like to RAID two of my disks, and I was wondering if the
recommendation is to do software or hardware RAID? Don't even consider hardware RAID solutions that became out-of-favour 25 years ago. You can easily do it with LVM/MDR combinations, but its more complicated and slower than the BTRFS solution, especially when rebuilding onto a new drive. Instead, because the normal Fedora installer is a bit brain-dead, unplug one of the drives and use the Fedora-default BTRFS setup. Then plug in the second drive back again, reboot and set up a RAID-1 configuration. See http://www.beginninglinux.com/btrfs for a quick tutorial. There is also a good reference guide on kernel.org, at https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Using_Btrfs_with_Multiple_Devices to see what can be done. BTRFS is massively faster and safer than all other implementations other than perhaps ZFS, is at least partially error compensating, does not demand identical drives, and can be easily converted into other RAID classes dynamically as desired.
I was going to recommend BTRFS but there's still a lot of people weary about it because of the long time to stabilization.
I have 4 4TB drives in a BTRFS RAID 1 array for all my media. I know RAID 5 is a bit touchy so I have put that off until I start to run out of space. The cool thing is I can convert on the fly!
I have installed btrfsmaintenancetools or whatever the package name is and am running scrubs and balances regularly.
Thanks, Richard