I personally think of a small DIY rack stuffed with commodity HDDs off Ebay with an LVM spanned across a bunch of RAID1s. I don’t want any complex architectural solutions since my homelab’s scale always equals 1. To my current understanding this has little to no obvious drawbacks. What do you think?
Why btrfs and not ZFS? In my info bubble, the btrfs has a reputation of an unstable FS and people ended up with unrecoverable data.
That is apparently not the case anymore, but ZFS is certainly more rich in features and more battle-tested.
Just the 5-6 raid modes are shit. And its weird willingness to let you boot a failed raid without letting you know a drive is borked.
All I know about ZFS is that there are weird patent or closed source encumbrances or something. I hear it’s good, and it seems popular, I just avoid proprietary Oracle products.
As for btrfs, the only thing that’s claimed to be unstable is raid 5 or 6. And people use it in production saying the claims are overblown. I don’t. I use it in raid1 mode. But raid1 in btrfs doesn’t require a bunch of matching drives. It lets you glom together a number of mismatched disks and just puts every block on more than one of them. So it’s a nice cross between a raid and LFS or JBOD.
There’s a thing called OpenZFS. With ZFS happened almost the same thing as with Java. Oracle bought a company and tried to close ZFS, but people just reimplemented ZFS under a FOSS licence and community. I don’t know who uses Oracle ZFS nowadays. Everyone uses OpenZFS.
It’s true that there’s some licence incompatibility that doesn’t allow integrate OpenZFS into a Linux core, but it’s not like ZFS is proprietary
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/License.html