The Problem
In my NAS, I used to have a MergerFS pool on top of BTRF + SnapRAID.
I got the idea from the Perfect Media Server. I never got the setup to be managed exactly how the post described. However, the function of the pool itself was always great. Fast enough for media downloads and streaming. No real complaints there. I did have a few complaints with:
- Mounting 4+ btrfs drives
- Role-based disks - 1 parity, 2 bulk, 1 cache
- Losing my largest drive (12tb) to be parity only
- A half-baked tiered caching system
This was mostly user error but managing the pool and it’s underlying filesystems was something I didn’t want to keep having to do.
The Solution
Bcachefs