Question

4

How to create an external selfhealing btrfs USB HDD RAID 1 array?

rated 0 times [ 4] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 8901 / 2 Years ago, sat, february 19, 2022, 3:15:22

The hardware is an external 2TB bus powered USB disk.

What I want is a RAID1 setup of 2x 1TB btrfs.

Is this possible? How?

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Motivation

The motivation for me to use RAID1 btrfs is because I just read an article talking about how such a setup would repair corrupted files automatically when the checksum on one volume fails.

Example of what can happen with a .jpeg by just flipping one bit (I used vim for this. :%!xxd -b)

enter image description here

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago entmpy · Accepted Answer

I assume you use 2 external drives or 1 enclosure housing 2 or more drives. Theoretically it shouldn't matter if the devices are connected via USB or SATA, btrfs should be able to assemble the array once it finds the individual drives/partitions.

You should have a look at the btrfs kernel wiki. The first usecase seems to cover what you asked for:

mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

But I'm not sure about the selfhealing part. I only know that from ZFS.