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I read this but don't pretend to understand much of it. Still it does give me pause about any notion of going to a Raid 5 in future. Thoughts?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09 ... ilesystem/

AndyM wrote:I read this but don't pretend to understand much of it. Still it does give me pause about any notion of going to a Raid 5 in future. Thoughts?

Don't confuse btrfs-raid5 and "regular" RAID5. The same goes for any version of btrf-raid to be fair. These two things are by no means the same nor equal, which Jim Salter also clearly states in the article. I also do not see anything in the given article indicating that RAID5 is not a safe option, btrfs-raid5, yes, but not regular RAID5. There are, however, a few other articles [1][2] claiming that RAID5/6 is infeasible depending on the size of the disks but that is a different matter. Personally, with the size of disks I am using, I am not worried about using RAID5/6. I would never Btrfs for any setup, though, not even a single drive setup, but that is just me. Why? I have for years from the sideline watched Btrfs devolve into a cesspool as well as seen the inability of developers to do anything remotely constructive to save a filesystem which initially looked very promising - honestly, the project should have been killed of years ago and probably would have been had it not been kept alive by Red Hat's/Fedora's decision to use it by default. Luckily, Red Hat has come to their senses and is moving away from Btrfs but I wonder what kind ill decision-making caused SUSE to default to Btrfs at this point. Clearly someone at SUSE had a brain aneurysm in the morning but decided to leave for work anyway.

[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid- ... g-in-2009/
[2]https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid- ... g-in-2019/

ndl101

Thanks very much for your comments. I just set up a new NAS and I believe the default is BTFRS. At this point it would be pretty easy to reinitialize, something I will seriously consider.