Files
MajorWiki/01-linux/storage/snapraid-mergerfs-setup.md
MajorLinux 6592eb4fea wiki: audit fixes — broken links, wikilinks, frontmatter, stale content (66 files)
- Fixed 4 broken markdown links (bad relative paths in See Also sections)
- Corrected n8n port binding to 127.0.0.1:5678 (matches actual deployment)
- Updated SnapRAID article with actual majorhome paths (/majorRAID, disk1-3)
- Converted 67 Obsidian wikilinks to relative markdown links or plain text
- Added YAML frontmatter to 35 articles missing it entirely
- Completed frontmatter on 8 articles with missing fields

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-02 11:16:29 -04:00

87 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown

---
title: "SnapRAID & MergerFS Storage Setup"
domain: linux
category: storage
tags: [snapraid, mergerfs, storage, parity, raid, majorraid]
status: published
created: 2026-04-02
updated: 2026-04-02
---
# SnapRAID & MergerFS Storage Setup
## Problem
Managing a collection of mismatched hard drives as a single pool while maintaining data redundancy (parity) without the overhead or risk of a traditional RAID 5/6 array.
## Solution
A combination of **MergerFS** for pooling and **SnapRAID** for parity. This is ideal for "mostly static" media storage (like MajorRAID) where files aren't changing every second.
### 1. Concepts
- **MergerFS:** A FUSE-based union filesystem. It takes multiple drives/folders and presents them as a single mount point. It does NOT provide redundancy.
- **SnapRAID:** A backup/parity tool for disk arrays. It creates parity information on a dedicated drive. It is NOT real-time (you must run `snapraid sync`).
### 2. Implementation Strategy
1. **Clean the Pool:** Use `rmlint` to clear duplicates and reclaim space.
2. **Identify the Parity Drive:** Choose your largest drive (or one equal to the largest data drive) to hold the parity information.
3. **Configure MergerFS:** Pool the data drives into a single mount point.
4. **Configure SnapRAID:** Point SnapRAID to the data drives and the parity drive.
### 3. MergerFS Config (/etc/fstab)
On majorhome, the pool mounts three ext4 drives to `/majorRAID`:
```fstab
/mnt/disk1:/mnt/disk2:/mnt/disk3 /majorRAID fuse.mergerfs defaults,allow_other,cache.files=off,use_ino,category.create=mfs,minfreespace=20G,fsname=mergerfsPool 0 0
```
Adjust the source paths and mount point to match your setup. Each `/mnt/diskN` is an individual ext4 drive mounted separately — MergerFS unions them into the single `/majorRAID` path.
### 4. SnapRAID Config (/etc/snapraid.conf)
> **Note:** SnapRAID is not yet active on majorhome — a 12TB parity drive purchase is deferred. The config below is the planned setup.
```conf
# Parity file location
parity /mnt/parity/snapraid.parity
# Data drives
content /var/snapraid/snapraid.content
content /mnt/disk1/.snapraid.content
content /mnt/disk2/.snapraid.content
content /mnt/disk3/.snapraid.content
data d1 /mnt/disk1/
data d2 /mnt/disk2/
data d3 /mnt/disk3/
# Exclusions
exclude /lost+found/
exclude /tmp/
exclude .DS_Store
```
---
## Maintenance
### SnapRAID Sync
Run this daily (via cron) or after adding large amounts of data:
```bash
snapraid sync
```
### SnapRAID Scrub
Run this weekly to check for bitrot:
```bash
snapraid scrub
```
---