Written by: Robert R. Russell on Saturday, July 30, 2022.
The last few days have been frustrating. The good news is ZFS’s data protections actually works.
A bit of backstory. I have a storage server for my home network. That storage server previously had 6 hard drives in it. I used ZFS with in stripe over mirrors configuration. With only 4 drives this is commonly referred to as RAID10. One of the drives decided to start returning uncorrected read errors earlier in the week.
After some emergency drive purchases on Amazon. I started a full rebuild and migration of the storage array. Since, OpenZFS and Fedora are a bit less cooperative than Debian and OpenZFS, I decided to migrate the storage over to Btrfs. An ongoing performance degradation of this storage array is also responsible for the change. Btrfs has a data rebalance option which helps maintain the arrays performance after a longer term of use.
The migration has mostly gone okay. I am still cleaning up a few loose ends from some other maintenance on the storage server that was in progress before the storage array became degraded.
I have managed to crash a Btrfs file system. No comments about Btrfs not being production ready. ZFS wouldn’t have survived that mistake any better.
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