On 7/30/26 14:49, Casey Deccio wrote:
Great ideas. I originally did RAID5 because I wasn't sure how many
drives I wanted in the array, and I wondered if I might grow the array
at some point. But I'll consider RAID 1 if I settle on three drives.
Something over 10yr ago I was running RAID5 on a Windows 7 box, as I
recall, the disks were probably 500GB Seagate Baracuda as that is what I
tended to buy in that era. This was my second stab at RAID setup, and I
was unimpressed with the performance. Writes were way slow and the pool
kept randomly dropping disks.
My next RAID was RAIDZ with ZFS filesystem on FreeNAS (now TrueNAS),
running the same disks moved from the Win7 box wiped+reformatted, much
better performance. Now in recent years moved to Debian, and I've rarely
tried anything else since, except for the occasional odd RAID0 or RAID1
setup.
If your disks are SMR type then you might want to avoid ZFS. I think
eventually, newer SMR disks will play nicer with ZFS than the first
generations did. Maybe they're already there, I haven't followed SMR
news recently.
