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A bit of backstory: I used to have a raid 5 array on my main (win 7) computer using a highpoint raid controller. I used to think if any part died I could replace it, so I was safe as long as I did not do something stupid like formatting the disk accidentally I was safe. (I know, I know, "RAID is not a backup").

Predictably, when I decided to move over to raid 6 since raid 5 is apparently outdated and has a high chance of failing on a rebuild (the irony), one of the disks timed out and upon rebooting the controller decided to continue 'migrating' and wrecked the array.

Flash forward to now: I am rebuilding and want to do better. I plan to have a RAID in my main computer and another in a separate computer for backup (the backup computer will be linux). I've been reading about different file systems and btrfs seems very nice (especially countering bitrot) but it is not available on windows. Changing my main computer to linux is not an option.

What I want to do is setup an ubuntu VM, give it access to all the disks I want in the raid, and setting up a btrfs raid 6 there, then give windows access to it as a 'network disk'. I realize there will be speed and resource penalties; I am not concerned with those. However, I cannot find much information on doing this or any pitfalls there might be: Is this a good idea?

Edit: In particular I'm worried that giving ubuntu access to the disks via virtual box will somehow undermine the raid and/or the array would not be accessible from a bare metal linux installation.

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  • One thing you want to be sure to avoid is putting the VM anywhere on the disk array. You don't want to run into an issue where the array fails and then you are not able to access the VM. You would prob be best off if you get a older computer with sufficient SATA ports and install FreeNAS on it.
    – Richie086
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 3:30
  • I planning on doing that for my backup machine; I want my main comp to have btrfs as well so I don't just back up bit-rot errors to the backup machine.
    – user543449
    Commented Jan 11, 2016 at 6:40

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Your proposed config has been working well for me for probably about 2 years now. I run my HTPC on Windows 8.1 with Hyper-V, and I run a "NAS" Hyper-V Guest Ubuntu machine. The Ubuntu VM OS disks runs from a VHD on my Windows disk, and I have 4 hard drives containing only a full disk size VHD on them, that are attached to the Ubuntu VM. The disks in Ubuntu are used in a RAID10 BTRFS volume, that is shared via Samba. I avoided RAID5/6 as there are still scary experimental tags on BTRFS more so than with RAID1/10. This seems to be working well. Performance is good, often filling the gigabit link, and when I had a disk start to fail recently, I was able to replace the drive in the array without issue.

( I came here also trying to get some opinions on if this config is a "good idea", but perhaps a few years of production use is the answer )

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