BTRFS and RAID 5?

[awilliams009]

Hi,

I am considering purchasing a Lockerstor 4 Gen 2. My primary use case is long-term storage for my photos. I want to use BTRFS for its ability to help protect against data corruption/bit rot. I've read, however, that BTRFS doesn't work well with RAID levels 5 and 6. Does Asustor's implementation of BTRFS allow for both stable RAID 5 and data corruption protection?

As a disclaimer, I'm pretty new to this space so I may be completely misunderstanding what I've been reading. I'm just trying to make sure I can achieve my main objective with the Asustor. I've looked at QNAP for their use of ZFS, but they're soooo expensive!

Thanks!

[Nazar78]

IIRC Asustor doesn't use raid provided by btrfs natively but instead it uses mdadm for raid then creates the btrfs volume over it.

So this means there's no btrfs raid 5/6 bug but you also don't get the bit rot protection due to the fact that it doesn't directly access the block device. Also if I'm not mistaken btrfs doesn't support ssd cache so it needs another layer dmcache to do the ssd caching.

I'm not using btrfs on my NAS but had tested playing around with several of its usage. Had once recreated my raid 10 due to human error (used the wrong cache metadata from a different disk) but I still stick with ext4 for stability.

Maybe others more experience with btrfs on the Asustor can comment further.