I’m using Snapraid to provide parity protection to media I have ripped or downloaded to two 4TB drives.  I have one matching 4TB drive set as the parity drive.  All are formatted as XFS.  I thought about using BTRFS or EXT4 and setting “-m 0” to allocate the full space, but I’ve been running XFS for my media storage for 10+ years with great results so I went with the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” route.

Per the Snapraid manual, one parity drive can protect up to four data drives.  All three drives in my Snapraid array are full disk encrypted using LUKS.  This did require some careful attention to mount points as Linux doesn’t always identify the drive in chassis slot #1 as /dev/sda but instead might attach it as /dev/sdf during a reboot.  This causes much chaos.  Using UUID’s in the /etc/crypttab, /etc/fstab, and snapraid.conf solve the issues.

I chose to store the content file on the os volume and each data drive, leaving me with three copies.

On my data drives I have a “scratch” directory to store temp files resulting from unzipping or files being ripped/converted.  To avoid capturing these in a sync, I’m excluding them in the snapraid configuration.  Also excludes are other temp files like .ThumbDB, etc.