First: You are absolutely correct, BTRFS is still marked as unstable and shouldn't be used on data that you will have problems if you lose. In general, BTRFS is stable on stable workloads(IE no weird hardware failure, power failure, and the like), but there have been instances of corruption/data loss/failure. RAID 5/6 was supposed to be committed to the next kernel, but it didn't make it in. Here is a quote from the last Kernel commit from Chris: >RAID5/6 did miss the cut this time because I'm having trouble with corruptions. I'll nail it down next week and post as a beta testing before 3.6 BTRFS SHOULD be stable under this load, but if you don't want to transfer the data, it would be best to go with a more proven FS. Last week we had a user who didn't have backups and had a small RAID controller hickup, and he lost all of his data - so it does happen. I joined this mailing list a while back because I plan on doing something much like you, RAID 5(with hotspares) on my home built NAS starting at about 5 3tb SATA drives with room for expansion to around 24. I will hopefully be doing this around Christmas(truly the only thing I'm waiting on is RAID 5/6 and more stability). So I have a hard time telling you to not do this but I will also have backups and such. Hopefully I gave you some things to think about!
On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 4:29 AM, David Pottage <david.pott...@sophos.com> wrote: > > I am looking for the opinions on how stable btrfs is when used with a big > server with lots of discs, but no fancy file system usage. > > I have read the warnings about btrfs being experimental, and that I should > have tested backups elsewhere. > > I am working on a project to set-up a backup server that will store > approximately 100 Tb of files. The average file size is around 10 Mb, but > there is a lot of variability. The files are compressible on average by 50%. > The anticipated workload will see files written with transparent zlib > compression, occasionally read, and never modified or deleted. I don't plan > to create snapshots. > > I have purchased a big storage server (1) with 24 3Tb hard drives. I was > considering creating a single btrfs volume spanning all the drives, with no > raid, lvm or suchlike below btrfs. The server will run Ubuntu Precise, with > the latest stable kernel (from kernel.org). (I don't plan to use btrfs for > any system volumes) > > Do you think btrfs will be stable under this workload? The data will be > backed up elsewhere, but considering the massive amount of data, it will take > over a month to populate the server over Gigabit Ethernet, and I don't want > to do it a second time if btrfs corrupts the data. > > Also, I would like to use Raid-5 on the file data, but I understand that > those patches are not yet integrated. Is there an estimate of when they will > be in? (realize that it would be just an estimate, but it would be nice to > have an idea). > > Thank you. > > (1) http://www.supermicro.nl/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R36N.cfm > > -- > David Pottage > Sophos Labs, Abingdon > > > ________________________________ > > Sophos Limited, The Pentagon, Abingdon Science Park, Abingdon, OX14 3YP, > United Kingdom. > Company Reg No 2096520. VAT Reg No GB 991 2418 08. > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in > the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
