Before configuring SnapRAID, consider:

• How many data disks?
  • SnapRAID protects your data by storing parity on a separate drive, so you’ll need at least one data disk and one parity disk.

• How much parity?
  • One parity disk protects against one drive failure, two parity disks protect against two failures, and so on.

• Which drives hold parity and content?
  • The parity disk should have enough free space for the parity data, while your content should be spread across multiple data drives for better redundancy and organization.

The main configuration file for SnapRAID is /etc/snapraid.conf.

A basic configuration for three data disks and one parity disk looks like this:

/etc/snapraid.conf

# Parity file - stored on the largest disk or a dedicated parity drive.
parity /mnt/disk3/snapraid.parity  
 
# Content files - store metadata; should be on multiple drives for redundancy.
content /mnt/disk1/snapraid.content  
content /mnt/disk2/snapraid.content  
 
# Data drives - these contain actual files.
data d1 /mnt/disk1  
data d2 /mnt/disk2  
data d3 /mnt/disk3

For better protection and logging, add:

/etc/snapraid.conf

# Define the block size used for parity calculations (default is 256K).
block_size 256  
 
# Auto-save changes to the content file before syncing.
autosave 300  
 
# Enable scrub (data integrity check) with a limit on recovered errors.
scrub_percent 10
scrub_recover 5