BTRFS RAID 5/6 Volumes

[bradhager]

So this maybe blasphemy but I'd love to see two types of storage pool/volumes options in unRAID. The current model with parity disks and data disks; and a new model using more traditional striped parity RAID 5/6 with the ability to add additional disks, expand the volume and have hot spares. Using something like MDADM, LVM, or BTRFS RAID (experimental I know). My biggest pain point is the transfer speeds and accessing data (IOPS) on unRAID when transferring multiple TB's of data at once, especially when my writes are hitting the same volume as my reads. Also transferring 50+ TBs to unRAID at a time right now takes forever with single disk performance of 200-250 MB/s (With Turbo Write and NCQ enabled).

 

Thanks for any consideration to this request. Let me know if anything is unclear, if more details are needed or if there is a better/faster way to configure unRAID (I know about SSD/NVMe caching).

[trurl]

Those are already available in the cache pool:

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/#comment-480421

 

And support for multiple pools is planned for Unraid 6.9

[bradhager]

Are there any plans to add this for data pools as well as the configuration of data pools for RAID 5/6 through the GUI?

[JorgeB]

Data disks have an independent filesystem, this is what makes possible some of Unraid coolest features, like using different size disks, never losing data on the remaining disks even if you lose more disks than parity can protect, etc, it also has some disadvantages, arguably array read/write speed being the main one, you can use pools to get around that, I for example use various btrfs pools for speed and then move the data to the arrays mostly for cold storage, but if you want max speed on the main array that's not possible with Unraid, it's limited to a single disk speed.