Linux 4.4 Will Bring Clustered RAID1 & Journaled RAID5 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 4.4 Will Bring Clustered RAID1 & Journaled RAID5 Support

Within hours of the Linux 4.3 release, Neil Brown sent in the MD updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.4-MD-Update

[liam]

That journal seems as though it would close the write hole (depending on how the journal itself is written).

[terrywang]

I'd rather use Btrfs over md raid5 now that Btrfs is officially supported by latest major Enterprise Linux distros - SLES, Oracle Linux.

Even ZFS on Linux is a better choice...

[gilboa]

I'd rather use Btrfs over md raid5 now that Btrfs is officially supported by latest major Enterprise Linux distros - SLES, Oracle Linux.

Even ZFS on Linux is a better choice...

Actually, I've been using MD RAID 5 and 6 in large number of production servers for years now, and its *very* *very* *very* resilient (it survived dead drives, dead controllers, power outages and even pulling drives out the bay by mistake).
Heck, I even managed to recover *all* the data from a 6 (5+1) x 2TB RAID5 that had bad sectors appear on 4 out of 6 drives (dead UPS).

BTRFS is years away from reaching the same level of maturity.
- Gilboa

[terrywang]

Actually, I've been using MD RAID 5 and 6 in large number of production servers for years now, and its *very* *very* *very* resilient (it survived dead drives, dead controllers, power outages and even pulling drives out the bay by mistake).
Heck, I even managed to recover *all* the data from a 6 (5+1) x 2TB RAID5 that had bad sectors appear on 4 out of 6 drives (dead UPS).

BTRFS is years away from reaching the same level of maturity.
- Gilboa

Btrfs with multiple devices (different specs + size) with RAID{0,1,10} is totally fine, perfect for consumer grade home storage solutions. As long as the users know what to avoid (raid 5 and 6).

[gilboa]

Btrfs with multiple devices (different specs + size) with RAID{0,1,10} is totally fine, perfect for consumer grade home storage solutions. As long as the users know what to avoid (raid 5 and 6).

Problem is RAID 0 is seldom used in any situation that requires any-type of data resilience (Which is, by design, the main reason to use Btrfs in production).
RAID1 usage is usually limited to OS drives, and RAID10 is lousy for anything that requires a lot data.
In short, if you need RAID for serious data storage, you usually opt for RAID5/6, which is far from being production ready.

In short, home storage? Possibly OK. Anything else? Use XFS/Ext4 over MDRAID.

- Gilboa