So I’ve been running a home media server with the arr suite on it, but it only has about 2 tb storage. The storage has been full for a couple months now which has rendered my server useless. Now I’ve bought a used nas with 32 tb on 7 disks. I’ve been advised to set it up in RAID. I’ve learned how to do that in OMV and it’s setting that up now.
It takes a while though, so that leaves me some room to think. Why do we do this? I understand that it gives me more unified storage, but I also want to run other things on this machine. Like k8s to deploy my own applications and play around with devops stuff. Or even just regular file storage and photobackup next to the films and series. I thonk I would like to keep those things seperate though, is that still possible with RAID? Or is it better to put 5 disks in RAID and keep the other two for other stuff? I think my question is, how do you use RAID “practically”? How do you store different things on there? Do you compartmentalize the disks again, or do you just make different folders?
OMV does RAID with Snapraid and MergerFS. You can also do ZFS RAID by changing the kernel to a proxmox type I believe.
One system here hosts a ZFS RAIDZ2 array, so 2 spare drives to recover from drive failure. It was the cheapest ZFS arrangement I could create and still maximise disk space. The access is through shares on the array and thats how they’re separated. i.e. separate shares for media, photos, my stuff, their stuff. ZFS is used here for long term data integrity, hopefully.
The other system is a set of different sized disks (formatted as BTRFS) in a JBOD arrangement on OMV with a MergerFS pool that puts all the drives into one mount point, the pool containing all the data across all of the disks. That array is accessed through a share on the pool having individual folders.
Unlike a RAID array this does not have any data parity disks so you can use all of the available disk space. If one disk is failing or fails you just loose that disk and not the whole JBOD array. MergerFs, in OMV at least, has a facility to copy a failing disks data to the free space on the MergerFS array or elsewhere, allowing a new disk to be inserted and integrated without loosing the data.
I think thats kind of neat and it allowed me to use up all the spare disks of various sizes that I has lying around. Data integrety isn’t so important for me in this case. Space was the motivation. I’m looking forward to a day when ZFS can do the same thing.
A backup is likely needed for both of the above.