SnapRAID with mhddfs

Some users have been experiencing issues with AUFS’s quirks in terms of moving, or deleting files. mhddfs does not have white out files and as result, works as people expect.
mhddfs is FUSE based, so it’s not going to saturate a gigabit ethernet connection like AUFS can, but for home users it should be fine for a media server. The other downside compared to AUFS is that it uses significantly more system resources. All that being said, mhddfs has a lot of nice features, and “it just works”. Even my wimpy Celeron 847 reads from the pool over NFS about 60-65MB/s and writes to it between 30-60MB/s. Faster CPUs come close to staturating gigabit over NFS. Here is a quick writeup to set it up.

apt-get install mhddfs

Next, create a mountpoint.

mkdir /storage

Make an entry in /etc/fstab

mhddfs#/media/disk1,/media/disk2,/media/disk3,/media/disk4 /storage fuse defaults,allow_other,nonempty 0 0

Finally, mount the pool.

mount -a

Here is a local Write and Read speed test…

root@fileserver:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/storage/testfile.out bs=1M count=10000; sync
10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 123.954 s, 84.6 MB/s

root@fileserver:~# dd if=/storage/testfile.out of=/dev/null bs=1M count=10000
10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 76.2646 s, 137 MB/s