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by pnutjam 2589 days ago
RAID seems very popular for 2 disk setups, but I don't like the cost benefit. With RAID under about 5 disks, you aren't getting much speedup, under 4 disks you can't do a proper fail-out and rebuild of a larger multi-disk volume.

I use 2 x 4TB disks in my homeserver, but I keep one online and have a script that brings up the other one periodically and rsyncs everything. This gives me a local backup, something RAID lacks, so I'm protected from fat fingering or accidentally deleting stuff. I also have very minimal downtime, because I can mount that drive in the place of the primary drive in just afew seconds.

I run xfs on the primary drive, and btrfs on the mirror, so I can take snapshots after I rsync and maintain differentials easily.

My point is, you should consider getting rid of RAID and just use the bare drive or LVS Volume.

1 comments

Agreed, RAID makes little sense if you want a quiet home storage that is used only occasionaly. Additional disk is better used for regular backups. If you need to minimize downtime and have the storage accessible 24/7, then RAID makes sense.