Re:Bcachefs Merged into the Linux 6.7 Kernel
by rini17 on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @07:28PM
(#38092732)
We're talking about btrfs raid1 here which always gives you half of total capacity of all disks (except for extreme cases). With 5 drives it's 2.5 drive worth of data. If 2 drives die means 1 drive worth of data was lost (more or less, depends on balance).
But… you have to weigh it against losing all your data. With raid5 if any 2 of your disks die at the same time then you've lost your volume and most likely 100% of your data (no matter how many disks you have).
With raid1 you have to lose _all_ your disks before that happens. Typically that's also just 2 but you can mirror 3 or more drives if you need some data to be _really_ resistant to disk failures and you don't care about "wasting" n-1 times the space.
So you end up trading off efficiency of storage space and resiliency to data loss.
Myself, disks got cheap enough that I always just buy 2 disks and mirror them. I find it easier to reason about overall, especially in the face of a degraded array.