I am planning on creating a home server with either 2 (RAID1) or 3 (RAID5) HDDs as bulk storage and 1 SSD as bcache.
The question is, what file system should I use for the HDDs? I am thinking of ext4 or xfs, as I heard btrfs is not recommended for my use case for some reason.
Do you all have some advice to give on what file system to use, as well as some other tips?
Personally I would go for ZFS with the SSD as a L2ARC. But among the options you listed I would do BTRFS RAID1 if you’re only gonna use two HDDs, and mdadm RAID5 with BTRFS on top if using three.
What are the advantages of this over mdadm raid and bcache?
L2ARC will kill a SSD faster than normal wear would.
It will yeah, although with modern SSDs it really isn’t a big problem. I’ve used an Samsung 840 EVO as L2ARC for 8 years now.