MajorLinux
6592eb4fea
- 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>
2.5 KiB
title, domain, category, tags, status, created, updated
| title | domain | category | tags | status | created | updated | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SnapRAID & MergerFS Storage Setup | linux | storage |
|
published | 2026-04-02 | 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
- Clean the Pool: Use
rmlintto clear duplicates and reclaim space. - Identify the Parity Drive: Choose your largest drive (or one equal to the largest data drive) to hold the parity information.
- Configure MergerFS: Pool the data drives into a single mount point.
- 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:
/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.
# 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:
snapraid sync
SnapRAID Scrub
Run this weekly to check for bitrot:
snapraid scrub