[Discuss] On Btrfs raid and odd-count disks

[markw at mohawksoft.com]

Its funny, but I never considered an odd number of drives as viable for
raid1. I guess its simple enough Dn + D(n+1 >= N ? 0 : n+1), but doesn't
"feel" right.


> Today I ran into a problem that I hadn't expected but I should have
> expected.
>
> Remember that Btrfs "raid" replicates file data and metadata, not disk
> blocks. If you have three disks in a raid1 configuration then any file
> written to one disk will have a replica written to another disk. If you
> have 3 times 500G disks then you have ~700G usable capacity. df reports
> this as 1.2T since it doesn't fully understand Btrfs.
>
> Mostly.
>
> Say you have 500G disks in a 3-disk raid set, and you've stored 150G of
> data. df will show 300G used and 1.1T free. That's 550G usable after
> dividing by half for mirroring. The largest file that you can write is
> still only 400G. This assumes even balancing of that 300G across all of
> the disks in the set. If that 300G is a single 150G file which is
> replicated across two disks in the set then the largest file that can be
> written is 350G -- the space available on those two disks.
>
> And if you do fill up one of the disks, such as by using dd like I did,
> then you will start getting file system full errors despite df showing
> plenty of usable space.
>
> --
> Rich P.
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