To answer your question by asking another one, have you considered ZFS? This is what I use for a RAID10 setup in my NAS, in part because it's just what I know how to use, but its checksumming, CoW snapshotting (unlike LVM, you do not have to allocate space
for one explicitly), and array management features are quite nice. The only downside is that it's out-of-tree, so if you're using a distro that updates the kernel fairly frequently, you have to wait a little while for the ZFS folks to update it.
On my desktop (which runs Fedora, and made using ZFS annoying since it upgrades kernels often), I use mdadm with two drives in RAID1, with xfs on top of them. IIRC, the reason I went with mdadm over LVM was simply because of maturity, but that's perhaps not
the reason you're looking for :)
Speaking about performance is where I step out of my depth a little bit, but to my understanding, xfs has very good support for a large number of small/parallel reads (don't quote me on this). Might be worth considering using this on top of mdadm.
From: Michael Voorhis via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2021 3:34 PM To: Worcester Linux Users' Group General Discussion <wlug@lists.wlug.org> Cc: Michael Voorhis <mvoorhis@mcvau.net> Subject: [EXT] [WLUG] Disk mirroring in Linux -- MD-RAID or LVM? Advantages and disadvantages?
Hi all;
In Linux I can do software RAID using LVM or with MD (i.e., mdadm) as a
basis. I'm currently thinking of a simple mirror of two conventional
SATA disks.
The machine is being built to do a compute-workload involving
examination of many small(ish?) files, and will not be a desktop or a
recreational/gaming machine. I don't know anything about the files or
how they'll be examined.
How would YOU setup a simple mirror in whatever Linux you use? Why do
you prefer your selection?