I just found this project by browsing the mergerfs documentation. It claims to be an opensource fork of the Unraid software that makes it so flexible. The documentation isn’t great, but has all the basic info to get going. It works kinda like Snapraid in that each disk has it’s own filesystem and parity is calculated across all of the drives, but it happens in real time (unlike with snapraid).
Thoughts? comments? Would you trust this with important data?
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Warning
☢️ This is an early-stage project, and while the driver and nmdctl management tool have been tested in both virtualized environments and some physical setups, data loss is still a possibility. This is mainly intended for DIY enthusiasts comfortable with Linux command line usage.
Use at your own risk, and always have backups!
No, I would not trust it with important data.
Yeah yeah yeah but ignoring that… Would you?
What is the gain compared to running something battle tested like zfs or mdraid?
The selling point of unraid is that you can mix and match different disk sizes and it figures out a (good, efficient?) way to handle them even as you grow a pool. You’re not going to have a good time with a 1TB drive, a 2 TB drive and a 15 TB drive using zfs, unraid doesn’t care… (Using and preferring zfs myself, by the way; this is heresay.)
Another benefit is if you lose your all parity disks and a data disk, you can still access the filesystem on the other data disks. So if the array fails, you don’t lose all the data, just the 1 (failed) disk worth of files.
Ah, I can see the appeal but it’s not for me then. :)
Cool idea!
But why would I use it? What advantage does I give me over traditional MD? The opportunity to use different filesystems on different disks? Or hot-add already formatted disks? I don’t really get it.
