I got 4 20TB drives from Amazon around Black Friday that I want to get setup for network storage. I’ve got 3 descent Ryzen 5000 series desktops that I was thinking about setting up so that I could build my own mini-Kubernetes cluster, but I don’t know if I have enough motivation. I’m pretty OCD so small projects often turn into big projects.

I don’t have an ECC motherboard though, so I want to get some input if BTRFS, ZFS, TrueNAS, or some other solution should be relatively safe without it? I guess it is a risk-factor but I haven’t had any issues yet (fingers crossed). I’ve been out of the CNCF space for a while but Rook used to be the way to go for Ceph on Kubernetes. Has there been any new projects worth checking out or should I just do RAID and get it over with? Does Ceph offer the same level of redundancy or performance? The boards have a single M.2 slot so I could add in some SSD caching.

If I go with RAID, should I do RAID 5 or 6? I’m also a bit worried because the drives are all the same so if there is an issue it could hit multiple drives at once, but I plan to try to have an online backup somewhere and if I order more drives I’ll balance it out with a different manufacturer.

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    If you’re planning to go BSD, or buy all the drives you’re ever gonna have in the cluster up-front, then ZFS is great. Otherwise, be mindful of the hidden cost of ZFS. Personally, for my home server, because I’m gradually adding more drives still, I’m using mdraid on RAID6 with 8 x 8TB WD Reds/HGST Ultrastars, and I’m loving the room for activities.

    Having said that, regardless of the solution you go with, since you’ve got only 4 drives, higher RAID level (and equivalent of thereof such as RAIDZ2) might be out of reach as you’d be “wasting” a lot of space for the extra piece of mind. If I were in your situation, I’d probably use RAID5 (despite RAID 5 is dead in 2009, or have they continued chugging on after 2013) for less important data (so sustain 1 drive failure) or RAID 10 if I need more performance (and depending on luck of draw, potentially sustain 2 drive failures depending on which drive fails).

    • John Richard@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks. I believe TrueNAS does ZFS as well… maybe by default. If I want to keep it simple this will probably be the route I go.