Rethinking RAID: When Mirrors Beat Parity in a Homelab

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 10:14:00 +0000

Almost everyone building their first NAS reaches for parity RAID, and I understand exactly why. Parity — RAID5, RAID6, RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2 — promises the best storage efficiency: buy five disks, lose only one disk’s worth to redundancy, keep four disks’ worth of usable space. Mirroring feels wasteful by comparison, because half your capacity vanishes into the copy. On a spreadsheet parity wins, and the spreadsheet is the wrong tool for this decision. After running both at home, I now build mirrors far more often than the capacity maths suggests I should, and this article is the argument for why.

Raid - vo.rs

Rethinking RAID: When Mirrors Beat Parity in a Homelab