Post #2968433
2026-02-23 22:02 UTC
I built a franken-server from some bits awhile ago using old disks of different sizes.
The disks were formatted individually with BTRFS (Mostly any FS would do) and then a mergerfs pool setup across all the drives. I got full use of all my old drives. Sizes varied between 1TB and 6TB, gave me 20Tb of usable space.
Mergerfs has no redundancy and no parity although it is designed to work with snapraid.
If a drive is lost only the data on that drive is lost, you just need to replace that one drive, the data on the other drives remains intact. The loss of a drive in a Raid0 or JBOD array, results in the loss of the whole array and all the data.
Some sort of backup is probarbly appropriate.
https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/latest/
Might be worth a look.
Replies (2)
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@Overspark@piefed.social 2026-02-23 23:15
I use mergerfs (and snapraid because I do care about my data and want parity) on ext4 formatted disks. This is a much better way to use your disks if you're mostly just storing media. RAID is for mitigation of downtime after drive failure, not for joining a bunch of (differently sized?) disks into one pool if downtime isn't really a problem.
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@GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 2026-02-23 22:41
Interesting. Looks like I have some reading to do.