That’s fair. I chose ZFS because I’ve used it before. And understand it fairly well already. I know nothing about BTRFS, so perhaps you could educate me a little. I’m working on setting up a cloudstack host using ZFS RAID 10. Does BTRFS have a flexible architecture to where you could do something similar?

Edit: Perhaps you could also inform me of the speeds of BTRFS too. From what I understand, ZFS outperforms BTRFS in large datasets, but I don’t know where the cutoff is. I’ll let you know it would need to run 12 ea 10TB HDDs.

Uh… I don’t have a separate partition for /home. I have a separate zfs filesystem for it though. If I run into issues, I can restore from snapshot and not affect it.

oOoo… 10 upvotes on a zfs raid 10. I feel like I got the perfect amount.

That is totally fair. Actually I just upgraded to 12 TB drives and that’s why I’m working on this. So huge props to your design choice. Also props for using zfs, I feel like it flies under the radar a lot.

Interesting… Though I know nothing about your particular setup, or migrating existing data, I have a similar project in the works. This project is to automatically setup a ZFS RAID 10 on Ubuntu 24.04.

If you are interested in seeing how I am doing it, I used the openzfs root on Debian/Ubuntu guides.

Debian

Ubuntu

For the code, take a look at this git hub: https://github.com/Reddimes/ubuntu-zfsraid10/

One thing to note is this runs two zpools, one for / and one for /boot. It is also specifcally UEFI and if you need legacy you need to change the partitioning a little bit(see init.sh)

BE WARNED THAT THIS SCRUBS ALL FILESYSTEMS AND DELETES ALL PARTITIONS

To run it, load up a ubuntu-server live cd and run the following:

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Reddimes/ubuntu-zfsraid10.git
cd ubuntu-zfsraid10
chmod +x *.sh
vim init.sh    # Change all disks to be relevant to your setup.
vim chroot.sh    # Same thing here.
sudo ./init.sh

On first login, there are a few things I have not scripted yet:

apt update && apt full-upgrade
dpkg-reconfigure grub-efi-amd64

There are two parts to automating this, either I need to create a runonce.d service(here). Or I need to add a script to the users profile.d directory which goes ahead and deletes itself. And also I need to include a proper netplan configuration. I’m simply not there yet.

I imagine in your case you could start a new pool and use zfs send to copy over the data from the old pool. Then remove the old pool entirely and add the old disks to the new pool. I certainly have never done this though and I suspect there may be an issue. The other option you have (if you have room for one more drive) is to configure it into a ZFS RAID 10. Then you don’t need to migrate the data, but just need to add an additional vdev mirror with the additional drive and resilver.

One thing I tried to do was to make the scripts easily customizable. It still is not yet ready for that, though. You could simply change the zpool commands in the init.sh.