RAID Configurations Reliability

Discussions focus on various RAID levels like RAID 5, 6, 10, RAIDZ, and alternatives such as ZFS or Btrfs, debating their reliability, fault tolerance, rebuild risks, performance, and the necessity of backups.

➡️ Stable 0.5x Hardware
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Keywords

PITA Z2 RAID10 RAIDZ2 RAID5 DP RAID6 ZFS TB OS raid disks zfs array btrfs disk drives rebuild backup performance

Sample Comments

boredinballard Dec 9, 2016 View on HN

RAID is fine. As long as it's RAID 10 haha.

hestefisk Jun 8, 2023 View on HN

RAID is not a backup guarantee. Use zfs.

andrewstuart2 Aug 2, 2017 View on HN

RAID1 meaning you get one chance. Just move to RAID10 if you're worried. (/s)

pnutjam Jul 6, 2019 View on HN

That's true with any hardware level raid. Do raid in software or better yet, use btrfs.

burnt-resistor Jul 24, 2025 View on HN

RAID10 (mdraid+lvm+xfs (never use lvm raid) or btrfs) is way more convenient in terms of rebuild speed, simplicity, performance, and also supports online growing and online shrinking (btrfs only). If there are any failures in a batch, it signals the need for possible proactive replacement. The biggest predictor Google found that SMART doesn't catch is slightly elevated temperatures. ZoL (as opposed to SmartOS/Solaris ZFS) bit me before (array permanently unmountable on good drives) and

shiftpgdn Jan 16, 2014 View on HN

Why not Raid 60 with Btrfs? It'll tolerate two disk loss with pro-active parity protection via btrfs and be faster and provide you with more disk space.

orangepurple Aug 23, 2023 View on HN

You should probably be using RAID Z2 in that case which supports simultaneous 2 drive failure without a problem

maccam94 Jul 13, 2018 View on HN

I'm using RAIDZ2 with 8 drives. It's even more fault tolerant than traditional RAID1 (when you lose <= 2 drives at once) and still only eats 2/n x capacity (n=8) for parity.

viraptor Feb 20, 2024 View on HN

Raid 5/6 should not be used. Other levels work just fine. This is not a raid-in-general problem.

ddtaylor Oct 8, 2025 View on HN

Use a RAID5 and hope the write hole doesn't eat it all =(