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.Pottage@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
>
>
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