On Wed, Mar 1, 2023 at 2:45 PM John Mellor <john.mellor(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2023-03-01 3:01 p.m., Ranjan Maitra wrote:
> I would like to RAID two of my disks, and I was wondering if the
recommendation is to do software or hardware RAID?
Don't even consider hardware RAID solutions that became out-of-favour 25
years ago. You can easily do it with LVM/MDR combinations, but its more
complicated and slower than the BTRFS solution, especially when
rebuilding onto a new drive. Instead, because the normal Fedora
installer is a bit brain-dead, unplug one of the drives and use the
Fedora-default BTRFS setup. Then plug in the second drive back again,
reboot and set up a RAID-1 configuration. See
http://www.beginninglinux.com/btrfs for a quick tutorial. There is also
a good reference guide on
kernel.org, at
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Using_Btrfs_with_Multiple_Devices
to see what can be done. BTRFS is massively faster and safer than all
other implementations other than perhaps ZFS, is at least partially
error compensating, does not demand identical drives, and can be easily
converted into other RAID classes dynamically as desired.
I was going to recommend BTRFS but there's still a lot of people weary
about it because of the long time to stabilization.
I have 4 4TB drives in a BTRFS RAID 1 array for all my media. I know RAID 5
is a bit touchy so I have put that off until I start to run out of space.
The cool thing is I can convert on the fly!
I have installed btrfsmaintenancetools or whatever the package name is and
am running scrubs and balances regularly.
Thanks,
Richard