I am vaguely familiar with a few COW/modern filesystem concepts, and am nowhere near an expert or even beyond neophyte status when it comes to btrfs. I've just installed Rockstor on a machine I intend to use for a household NAS so I have easy configuration at my behest; I've got 7 free disks total and I'm quite unsure as to how I should approach configuring pools to fit my desires, which are flexible at this point, so long as I have a reasonably reliable, maintainable and upgradable NAS. I'm starting with four 160 GB disks and three 500 GB disks. They're good and used and a couple of which seem to run a bit hot so I may be replacing drive/s in the near future, and as far as I'm concerned this should give me a good opportunity to learn how to deal with drive failure, as well as upgrades, from the get-go. I'd like to avoid data loss as best I can, but it will by no means be the end of the world if I end up losing data from this device because of a multiple drive failure - this is what backups are for.That said, I have a few questions:How can I configure my setup for maximum storage capacity while allowing for the failure and subsequent upgrade of any one drive at a time; one pool using all drives, two pools having drives of similar size or otherwise?Which btrfs supported/stable RAID level(s) will be best for this?What other things should I be mindful of, knowing I'll likely be replacing drives one at a time as they fail, and with larger drives?What is your opinion at this stage; are my wants and desires asking for trouble or are they reasonable?I'll also gladly read any good resources you can point me to which might help me make a more educated decision.
How should I approach designing my btrfs pool/s?
raid;btrfs;nas