I am thinking of extending my storage and I don’t know if I should buy a JBOD (my current solution) or a RAID capable enclosure.
My “server” is just a small intel nuc with an 8th gen i3. I am happy with the performance, but that might be impacted by a bigger software RAID setup. My current storage setup is a 4-bay JBOD with 4TB drives in RAID 5. And I am thinking of going to 6 x 8TB drives with RAID 6 which will probably be more work for my little CPU
I used to use mdadm, but ZFS mirrors (equivalent to RAID1) are quite nice. ZFS automatically stores checksums. If some data is corrupted on one drive (meaning the checksum doesn’t match), it automatically fixes it for you by getting the data off the mirror drive and overwriting the corrupted data. The read will only fail if the data is corrupted on both drives. This helps with bitrot.
ZFS has raidz1 and raidz2 which use one or two disks for parity, which also has the same advantages. I’ve only got two 20TB drives in my NAS though, so a mirror is fine.
If I were to redo things today I would probably go with ZFS as well. It seems to be pretty robust and stable. In particular the flexibility in drive sizes when doing RAID. I’ve been bitten with mdadm by two drives of the “same size” that were off by a few blocks…
