Me and a couple of friends have been running our own root server for literal decades, and the hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth, so time for an upgrade.
The question right now is which storage configuration to pick, it's mostly a choice between RAID0-ish(*) over 2 x 8 TB disks or RAID5 over 3 x 4 TB. What does the fediverse think?
(*) not a live RAID0, but a nightly mirror from main disk to backup disk
@floe Yes more or less, for you can make ZFS RAID-Z2 with 3 disks, giving you usable space of about only 1-disk worth.
With 4+ disks, you get more usable space (& the ZFS pool can tolerate failure of 2 disks).
@ToshInMacc What was the typo? What OpenZFS document mentions the absolute need for minimum of 4 disks?
For #RAIDZ2 #OpenZFS documentation mentions https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Basic%20Concepts/VDEVs.html#what-are-the-different-types-of-vdevs ...
ใ... Requires at least 3 disks (5+ recommended), can tolerate two drive failures.ใ
@ToshInMacc All good; I got the understanding of RAID 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels .
@ax6761 @floe Worth noting that a three-member raidz2 and a three member mirror give the same fault tolerance and write performance, but there are two major differences. The mirror will have about 3x the read performance, while the raidz2 allows expanding the poolโs capacity one disk at a time while maintaining fault tolerance.
If youโre only ever going to have three disks, a three-member mirror is strictly better.
Florian 'floe' Echtler
ax6761
Andy H
Zimmie