I’m installing 3x2TB HDDs into my desktop pc. The drives are like-new.

Basically they will replace an ancient 2tb drive that is failing. The primary purpose will basically be data storage, media, torrents, and some games installed. Losing the drives to failure would not be catastrophic, just annoying.

So now I’m faced with how to set up these drives. I think I’d like to do a RAID to present the drives as one big volume. Here are my thoughts, and hopefully someone can help me make the right choice:

  • RAID0: Would have been fine with the risk with 2 drives, but 3 drives seems like it’s tempting fate. But it might be fine, anyhow.
  • RAID1: Lose half the capacity, but pretty braindead setup. Left wondering why pick this over RAID10?
  • RAID10: Lose half the capacity… left wondering why pick this over RAID1?
  • RAID5: Write hole problem in event of sudden shutoff, but I’m not running a data center that needs high reliability. I should probably buy a UPS to mitigate power outages, anyway. Would the parity calculation and all that stuff make this option slow?

I’ve also rejected considering things like ZFS or mdadm, because I don’t want to complicate my setup. Straight btrfs is straightforward.

I found this page where the person basically analyzed the performance of different RAID levels, but not with BTRFS. https://larryjordan.com/articles/real-world-speed-tests-for-different-hdd-raid-levels/ (PDF link with harder numbers in the post). So I’m not even sure if his analysis is at all helpful to me.

If anyone has thoughts on what RAID level is appropriate given my use-case, I’d love to hear it! Particularly if anyone knows about RAID1 vs RAID10 on btrfs.

  • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    20 hours ago

    Look, there is a reason everyone who actually knows this stuff use ZFS. A good reason. ZFS is really fucking good and BTRFS has absolutely nothing on it. It’s a toy in comparison. ZFS is the gold standard in this class.

    You have four sane options:

    • mdraid raid5 with BTRFS on top. Raid5 on BTRFS still isn’t stable as far as I know, not even in 2026.
    • Mirror or triple mirror with mdraid. Have the third drive in the pool as more redundancy or outside the pool as separate unraided filesystem.
    • Same as above, but BTRFS. Raid1 is stable.
    • ZFS RaidZ1 (=raid5)

    (Not sure about bit rot recovery when running BTRFS on mdraid. All variants should at least have bit rot detection.)

    To reiterate, every storage professional I know has a ZFS-pool at home (and probably everywhere else they can have it, including production pools). They group BTRFS with Ext3, if they even know about it. When I built my home server, the distro and hardware was selected around running ZFS. Distros without good support for ZFS were disregarded right away.

    • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Sorry but I find this claim irreconcilable with how SLES and Fedora default to btrfs with their installations, or how a company like Meta uses it across their entire fleet.

      I don’t know if Meta uses the raid feature directly or if they use, as you suggested, mdraid with btrfs on top. I know that that’s what Synology does.