SnapRAID + MergerFS: A NAS Without the Rebuild Dread

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 10:30:00 +0000

Every conventional RAID array has the same nasty property: it’s all or nothing. Stripe six disks together in RAID5 or RAIDZ1 and lose two at once — which happens more often than the marketing suggests, because drives from the same batch tend to fail in the same window — and the entire array is gone in one stroke, five-sixths of it just as unreadable as the missing sixth. I ran a NAS that way for years, dreading every rebuild, because a rebuild is the single most stressful thing you can do to a hard drive: hours of sustained full-speed reads across every remaining disk, which is exactly the workload most likely to surface a second failure on an already-aging array.

Snapraid - vo.rs

SnapRAID + MergerFS: A NAS Without the Rebuild Dread