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Funny, I have the identical setup with a small SSD for /, and two of the 3TB Reds for my media/music/files. I have seen enough pain from HW Raid controller set

Funny, I have the identical setup with a small SSD for /, and two of the 3TB Reds for my media/music/files. I have seen enough pain from HW Raid controller setups (custom drivers, configs, long recovery) that HW Raid was right out. Then, for soft raid I had bad experiences in the past where the system refused to come up with one disk in the mirror pair bad. I'm sure there is a way to configure this properly but at this point I said fuck it and just mirror one of the WDs by hand to the other via rsync. Think hard (or even test): what actions will need to happen when one of your disks fails? And second, do you need backup or RAID more? Fat-finger deleting a file on a RAID-backed file system will leave you with no backup unless it has snapshots. Some notes. - Not having Raid really doesn't matter. The primary purpose seems to be to save a little bit of space by clever checksumming or increase read performance from parallel operation, but none of this is valuable to me. - I use ext4. I think it would make sense to move to a snapshot-capable system to make the periodic rsync-backups more correct (I don't even bother dropping to r/o mode, since it's fairly static data). - What really keeps me up at night: bit flips silently corrupting files. I think btrfs or ZFS are supposed to solve this through constant background checksumming. I really need a periodic process to checksum every file and take action on exceptions. Note that RAID will not help you with this. - This has worked pretty well so far. Twice already (over 12 years) have I had one disk in the pair fail, upon which time I would order a new pair (they were bigger/cheaper by that point and I figured the other one would fail soon) and rebuild the server.

Anthony-G 4y ago
Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I look after a couple of server in my current job that have hardware RAID (Dell) but they were set up by my predecessors and they’ve never given any trouble since I started working there (touch wood). I have also not had any problems with Linux Software RAID, e.g., I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could move the RAID 1 disks from my previous home server (a repurposed Dell workstation) to the Proliant microserver and my Debian OS had no problem recognising them. The consensus seems to be that RAID isn’t particularly useful for a home server. Backup would be more useful as I would be more likely to accidentally delete or over-write a file than for a disk to fail catastrophically) so I think I might use the second disk, similar to how you use yours. I would also be better served by using ZFS; its de-duplication would also be useful – so I’m going to try it as an experiment.

Anthony-G 4y ago

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. I look after a couple of server in my current job that have hardware RAID (Dell) but they were set up by my predecessors and they’ve never given any trouble since I started working there (touch wood). I have also not had any problems with Linux Software RAID, e.g., I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could move the RAID 1 disks from my previous home server (a repurposed Dell workstation) to the Proliant microserver and my Debian OS had no problem recognising them. The consensus seems to be that RAID isn’t particularly useful for a home server. Backup would be more useful as I would be more likely to accidentally delete or over-write a file than for a disk to fail catastrophically) so I think I might use the second disk, similar to how you use yours. I would also be better served by using ZFS; its de-duplication would also be useful – so I’m going to try it as an experiment.