I’m looking at different options for getting a NAS/RAID array system that is tolerant to not just hard drive failures but also to hardware/firmware and board failures. I’ve utilized a RAID array in the past that was built into the motherboard, which resulted in the motherboard failing and me having to ebay another one to get the RAID array back up and running. Then I bought a NAS 2 bay drive that was only compatible with drives up to 1.5TB. I’ve also used external drives for backup since I’ve been burned by hardware/firmware/software issues related to RAID arrays. Are there are any PCI RAID cards, NAS boxes or software RAID or other options where the hard drives would still be readable by other RAID cards if the boards failed? Maybe a software RAID solution? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
ZFS zRAID is pretty good for this I think. You hook up the drives from one “pool” to a new machine, and ZFS can detect them and see that they constitute a pool and import them.
I think it still stores some internal references to which drives are in the pool, but if you add the drives from the by-ID directory when making the pool it ought to be using stable IDs at least across Linux machines.
There’s also always Git Annex for managing redundancy at the file level instead of inside the filesystem.
I second this approach, but if one isn’t down with ZFS, LVM can bodge a raid onto any filesystem at the block layer. I don’t remember when I got over hardware raid envy and decided that I preferred software raid for my home lab, but it was a long while ago and I’ve never regretted it. Being able to plug some drives into any old USB, sata, or whatever port on any Linux box is super valuable when things start going sideways and you don’t have budget for spare hardware or rapid-response support contracts.
Thanks, reading up on ZFS now on Ars https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/zfs-101-understanding-zfs-storage-and-performance/
Sounds like I could dedicate a server machine to run a zRAID 1,2 or 3 with ZFS drives running on Linux or TrueNAS? Or were you thinking something a bit different for a setup?
That could work fine, probably? Or you could use it on the same machine as other stuff.