I have a pi4 running on an ssd over usb3 with a usb3 dock that has 2x2TB drives for storage.

At the moment I have mainly music on one and mainly video on the other, with important stuff on both and elsewhere.

Is it sensible to combine 2x2TB hdd’s via usb3 dock into a 4TB filesystem/pool/volume/thing…and if so can I have tiered storage so if one drive fails the other will have a mirror of important stuff?

  • @[email protected]English
    4•11 months ago

    Raid0 (combining both drives’ capacities) is not really tiered storage. You would want Raid1 (each drive is a copy of the other drive ), but doing this isn’t a backup. How will you be monitoring the drives so that you know if one of them actually fails?

    I don’t think the RPi has a new enough kernel, but with bcachefs you can do tiered storage. By combining the storage of the ssd + hardrives, into a single block device, then make the ssd the read/write cache, and give the whole pool replicas=2, so that that if one drive dies you still have the failover of the other drive. Do be aware this setup is still not a backup however.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      4•11 months ago

      Thanks,

      bcachefs could be the answer but I don’t really want my data on a fs I need this week’s kernel to access properly. Maybe I should just hold off for a few months.

      I’m not monitoring the drives, I have backups of important stuff…but would be nice to tag more important stuff amongst the mediocre stuff on the off chance both drives don’t fail at the same time.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•11 months ago

        Totally reasonable, something like LVM can at least get you to a raid1 setup, pretty easily.