Liking btrfs a lot. This weekend I started upgrading to a 2x2T drive setup for media from a single 1T drive. A bit of a pain, but I learned a bit. I also found out that my current drive was probably in worse shape than I thought.
- Upgrading Seagate drive firmware using grub2 chained bootable iso was a no-go. Will just have to live with it.
- Learned about GPT partitions and 4k sectors and gdisk. Nice to see that drive partitioning has almost progressed beyond MBR and 4 partitions.
- Added the new drive using btrfs device add
- Converted to RAID1 using btrfs balance
- Almost freaked out when my old drive hit a patch of bad sectors.
- Deleted some unused junk on the drive. Rebooted
- Started the balance again, success! (btrfs also remapped a bunch of bad metadata using it's built-in redundancy! btrfs read error corrected:)
Next up, removing the old drive and adding in the 2nd 2T drive, followed by moving the root and home partitions to a new SSD. Anyone using btrfs on their boot partition?
I really like the promise of btrfs a lot. I tried migrating to it last year and was very thankful for backups. I'm going to hang on for another year and then move over to it.
What I really like is the promise of seamlessly adding new disks to an array and removing smaller less efficient disks without doing the big software raid upgrade dance.
Simon Tennant (imaginator) , Dec 07 2012 on known.dev.inuus.com