I’ve always wondered, given the warnings in documentation, if there are any people brave enough to try Btrfs in a RAID5/6 configuration. Has anyone here actually tried it with “real” data?
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it’s still unstable and shouldn’t be used for anything except testing
If the devs say “unstable”, it’s probably unstable.
Given how flexible RAID1 in btrfs is, I don’t really see any benefit in using RAID5/6.
If the people on Phoronix are to be believed, it’s a buggy mess that will eat your data. Either way I would recommend using LVMRAID (as it’s much more mature) and putting BTRFS on top. Then you can put DM-Crypt between them and get easy FDE.
Some people in the comments of this claims to use it with real data https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.2-Btrfs-EXT4
If you use it don’t forget to use RAID1 for metadata
Yes.
I’d like to hear more. Are you still using it? What’s kind of data do/did you store on it?
Yes, as in, there were people using Btrfs RAID 5/6. It didn’t end well. Not that I’ve used it - I very much prefer having my data safe.
The warnings in the docs are there for a reason - those modes of Btrfs simply aren’t finished and thus aren’t fit to be used.
You can test this yourself easily in a VM, this will let you see how things fail for Btrfs 5/6 when one of the disks “fails”.
There are some folks over on aliensite that have been using RAID-5 and -6 for a while. Personally I’ve never tried it, because my use case needs the data redundancy more than the disk space.
As far as I know, as long as you’re not worried about either your data or a sudden power failure, they’re pretty solid. It’s a sudden system outage that is the danger.
Fragile. Works great when its working. When thjngs go wrong it’s difficult to see how anything can be salvaged.
I use it on my laptop and haven’t had any issues
It depends on what you call “real” data.
I find it good enough for home NAS that serve as jellyfin instance and store a hell lot of stuff. Things I would rather keep, but anything really critical is stored on several computers.
Works well so far (about 4 or 5 years already now) with raid5 for data but raid1 for metadata.
I tried it probably a decade ago and it ended badly.
The last time I checked it seemed like “the powers that be” running btrfs had shifted focus away from raid 5/6 because enterprises didn’t care about it.
Iirc there’s a big upcoming change that improves how btrfs works internally. This might improve btrfs raid 5/6. But yeah, currently it is recommended against btrfs raid 5/6
