Storage

BTRFS Filesystem

• Very scalable across drives — RAID can be enabled and modified on the fly
  • Adding more drives or replacing a failed one will be very low impact and simple
• Snapshotting allows for version control with a very minimal impact on storage
• Self healing through periodic scrubbing to help prevent data loss
• Supports compression to improve storage efficiency and speed
• Built in to the kernel, easy to deploy and migrate

Migration

• Switching to BTRFS was easy, on my desktop I just reformatted my secondary drive and started an rclone to move the data over to the new partition
• Then, all I had to do was add the other drive to the volume and run a balance to convert the drive
• I should have enabled compression before adding data to save time, but I activated it afterwards

Performance

• Using ZSTD compression saved me 11% of my data, or over 100gbs

$ sudo compsize vault/
Processed 257189 files, 4524094 regular extents (4524094 refs), 72685 inline, 486059 fragments.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced  
TOTAL       89%      1.0T         1.1T         1.1T       
none       100%      911G         911G         911G       
zstd        59%      183G         308G         308G

• Performance of the array for reads was very strong at nearly 200MB/s which is nearing my current 1gbps connection limit
  • Random read/write performance isn’t so good, as expected for mechanical drives

Drive Bay

The first custom bay I made for the rack was a 1U drive bay supporting 2 3.5” full-sized hard drives in my 10” rack.

Prototype

![[2b7b1f99-9a1a-42af-a964-fc07d9f92ea1.png]]

• This design is very simple and tight, 2 drives are set in and sit on foam strips for isolation and connect via a powered USB SATA adapter to the Mini PC
• It’s more than capable of supporting the hard drives ![[Pasted image 20251106091630.png]]