Btrfs
Reddit take
Not enough linked mention summaries yet; the source excerpts below are the evidence.
Pros
- Ubuntu and Debian support btrfs which can RAID across unequal drives.
- A modern file system such as ZFS or Btrfs usually takes care of such things by using checksums.
- Filesystems like zfs and btrfs have the checksums integrated as basic functionality but there are tons of other options as well.
- For my data from my NAS, I use btrfs on Fedora 43 to backup my NAS. Simple, easy and I use btrfs snapshot too, just in case I need to rollback a file or a directory.
- I wanted to have certainty my data is ok, so I use ECC memory, btrfs, snapraid and restic.
Cons
- The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data." ... "should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing. The power failure safety for metadata...
- Some users said their Btrfs pool went “Unavailable” after an update • A few mentioned RAID rebuilds acting weird on Btrfs but not on EXT4 • Reports of slower performance on HDDs with Btrfs (small files especially) • Some snapshot quir...
- OMV looked good until I found that the BTRFS scrubbing feature (the value-add for me) is largely hidden and the forum sentiment was to "just trust it to do its thing in the background".
- I've had issues with BTRFS on Zoned devices, so I typically use F2FS. Might have been fixed though. Zoned on BTRFS also disabled a lot of features like RAID making it harder to use in a traditional array.
- I'm yoloing RAID5 on btrfs. To each their own.
Sentiment
17 positive (57%) · 7 mixed (23%) · 6 negative (20%)
Trust + time weighted score: +40% · raw score 37%
What redditors said (10 of 30)
Ubuntu and Debian support btrfs which can RAID across unequal drives.
A modern file system such as ZFS or Btrfs usually takes care of such things by using checksums.
Filesystems like zfs and btrfs have the checksums integrated as basic functionality but there are tons of other options as well.
For my data from my NAS, I use btrfs on Fedora 43 to backup my NAS. Simple, easy and I use btrfs snapshot too, just in case I need to rollback a file or a directory.
I wanted to have certainty my data is ok, so I use ECC memory, btrfs, snapraid and restic.
The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data." ... "should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing. The power failure safety for metadata with RAID56 is not 100%"
Some users said their Btrfs pool went “Unavailable” after an update • A few mentioned RAID rebuilds acting weird on Btrfs but not on EXT4 • Reports of slower performance on HDDs with Btrfs (small files especially) • Some snapshot quirks (not deleting, freezing, etc.) • One or two cases where the Btrfs volume needed repairs after a bad shutdown • And a couple people said volume creation failed with Btrfs but worked fine with EXT4
OMV looked good until I found that the BTRFS scrubbing feature (the value-add for me) is largely hidden and the forum sentiment was to "just trust it to do its thing in the background".
Unless you were using an FS with built in checksumming like ZFS or btrfs, there's not much you can do to detect silent bit flips in the data.
after reading a bit more, I think a btrfs single pool would be the way to go for me.