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#1 2019-10-17 02:46:14

branthebuilder
Member
Registered: 2016-10-01
Posts: 65

BTRFS multidevice installation

On a lark I decided to reinstall on my laptop which has an SSD and HDD in a RAID system. I opted to use BTRFS with both disks as subvolumes in a single volume for the installation. Should I expect this arrangement to wear out my HDD quickly? If so, what is the best way to mitigate that?

Last edited by branthebuilder (2019-10-17 02:46:41)

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#2 2019-12-30 19:00:41

cmurf
Member
Registered: 2019-09-06
Posts: 27

Re: BTRFS multidevice installation

It won't affect wear. But it might affect performance because the SSD is much faster than HDD, and there's no way to control where the data will be stored. Also, there is small additional risk of one of the devices failing, and if one device fails, the whole file system will fail. If you've configured the data and metadata profiles for raid1 (either at mkfs time, or after the fact with a balance filter), upon device failure the next boot will fail because Btrfs doesn't support automatic degraded mounts.

At the expense of some complexity, an alternative is using LVM cache to combine the SSD and HDD. The SSD is used to speed up everything, but the HDD is used for the bulk of the storage. There are various policies that control this, and yeah it's a bit esoteric and complex. It can also make recovery complicated if one of the devices fails. In any case you'll want a well tested backup+restore strategy.

Last edited by cmurf (2019-12-30 19:05:31)

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