After reading [this Ars Technica article][1], I decided that I wanted to start using btrfs on my home fileserver. It had been running for a few years with an mdadm raid-10 array, formatted with ext4, holding about 3.4 TB of data. I figured I would take advantage of some of the special capabilities of btrfs to perform the conversion in place. After some research, I formed my basic plan.
- backup data to external drives
- remove two of the drives from the mdadm raid-10
- configure those two drive with a btrfs raid-0 filesystem
- copy the data from the degraded mdadm raid-10 to the new btrfs raid-0
- completely deactivate the mdadm raid-10