I currently have a secondary pool (with raidz2) that I was originally going to use for my important documents, such as storage for Paperless-ngx, as raidz offers corruption detection and repair. The pool is encrypted.

However, I’m concerned about rebuild times (it’s a pool of 4 22TB drives). Is btrfs a better choice for this use case, or should I just go with raidz like I originally planned?

  • felbane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    182·
    7 hours ago

    RAID is not a backup.

    RAID is not for data safety.

    RAID is for:

    1. Ensuring availability of data in the face of hardware failure. That means your files don’t disappear when a drive dies and you have some time to swap out for functional hardware and restore redundancy.
    2. Presenting multiple drives as one larger unit. This is what striping does, and to a lesser extent the parity-mode levels.
    3. Improving performance (sometimes). A RAID mirror is generally much faster to read from than any individual drive because reads can be interleaved across drive members. A stripe can be much faster because writes are distributed across drive members. This is less of a bonus today with solid state/nvme drives, but it’s still applicable to spinning rust.

    If your concern is protecting your data, set up a 3-2-1 backup strategy.