N-Way (traditional) RAID-1 development status

N-Way (traditional) RAID-1 development status

[james harvey]

Wanted to see if there's active development on N-Way (traditional) RAID-1.

By this, I mean that RAID-1 across "n" disks traditionally means "n"
copies of data, but btrfs currently implements RAID-1 as "2" copies of
data.  So, unlike traditional RAID-1, losing 2 drives in a many drive
array might cause data loss.  It's been mentioned before that N-Way
(traditional) RAID-1 should eventually be implemented through btrfs.

Re: N-Way (traditional) RAID-1 development status

[Austin S Hemmelgarn]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1476 bytes --]

On 2015-10-19 23:13, james harvey wrote:
> Wanted to see if there's active development on N-Way (traditional) RAID-1.
>
> By this, I mean that RAID-1 across "n" disks traditionally means "n"
> copies of data, but btrfs currently implements RAID-1 as "2" copies of
> data.  So, unlike traditional RAID-1, losing 2 drives in a many drive
> array might cause data loss.  It's been mentioned before that N-Way
> (traditional) RAID-1 should eventually be implemented through btrfs.
Before I go any further, I would like to point out that most traditional 
hardware RAID controllers only support two disks for RAID-1 
configurations, and the only one I've seen that doesn't does RAID-1 like 
BTRFS (two copies total of each block).  The whole 'RAID-1 on n disks is 
n copies' thing actually started with Linux's MD-RAID subsystem, and 
just happens to have been popular enough that other software RAID 
implementations adopted those semantics as well.

OK, with that historical rant out of the way, back to your actual 
question:  Based on what has been said in the past, N-way replication is 
planned for development after the raid56 code is considered stable. 
Based on that and past experience, I'd say to expect it no sooner than 
4.8, or if we're _really_ lucky, 4.7.  On top of that, based on past 
experience with BTRFS\, I would not suggest actually trying it for 
anything other than testing until at least one release after the initial 
release.


[-- Attachment #2: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature --]
[-- Type: application/pkcs7-signature, Size: 3019 bytes --]