First OMV-NAS with small price and many SATA ports

  • Hi all,


    I want to build my own NAS system. (Surprise!)
    Sorry for the long text and bad English. TLDR: See questions below


    Situation:
    I have lots of internal and external data discs and now I want to concentrate all data in one place. The problem is that I do have my important data backed up, but the most part is not because of cost reasons, laziness and because the data can be "restored". e.g. it's not nice if you loose a VM, but you can always rebuild it.


    Requirements:
    I need a RAID system, that's flexible in size. I have to be able to grow and/or shrink it.
    The price is also very important. That's the reason why I want to migrate my data (see below) and why I don't have ECC planned. The space should be approx 10 TB.


    My use case:
    First of all I want to have one big place where all my data is and I don't want to bother with disc boundaries.
    Secondary I would like to use my NAS as ownCloud device and backup place for my family. I'm not sure yet, how I will make it accessible over the Internet. I think the best solution is a VPN, if it works with smart phones.


    Why OMV:
    I use Linux (Ubuntu) since some time now and extremely pleased with the mixture of GUI and a powerful shell, which you can, but don't have to use. I expect a similar thing from OMV: The basic and main functions are accessible from the GUI and the special functions and tool can be accessed by SSH.


    My Plan:
    I have 2x 3TB and 2x 2TB and want tool buy additional 2x 3TB. My plan is to free the first 3 TB drive and build a RAID 5 with the first 3x 3TB and put the data on it. Then I free the next 3TB device and grow the RAID 5 to 4x 3TB. Then copy the data of the drive to the RAID. For the 2x 2TB I 'm not sure what to do. Either I create a RAID 0 and add it to the raid 5 (asymmetrical) or I create a RAID 1 and create a LVM of both raids (1 TB less).


    Hardware:
    I compiled a list of hardware which I want to buy. I think its a good compromise between expandability, performance per watt (idle), sata-ports and price. I want to use the USB stick as system drive and run the plug-in to reduce the writes. In the long term I want to run a RAID 5 of 3TB WD Reds.
    Link to the whole List or list as Spoiler:


    Software
    OMV, the newest stable release (V 2.x at the moment)
    omv-usbbackup (To do backups of my important data)
    omv-flashmemory (For the OS stick)
    ovm-lvm (For "connecting" the two RAIDs)
    omv-fail2ban (For additional safety)
    omv-openvpn (For connecting to VPN)
    omv-openvpnas (For supplying a VPN)
    omv-owncloud (For my own cloud :rolleyes: )
    omv-omvextrasorg (For all the nice plugins)
    omv-wol (For waking other PCs)
    omv-virtualbox (For running other OSes)


    Data-Structure:
    I will try to build this data structure:


    Questions
    Q - Hardware:
    1. Will it work with the Hardware listed above?


    Q - Data structure:
    2. Can I do my "grow RAID, Copy Data, Grow RAID, ..."-plan or will it fail? This should also be possible in the future if I want to add drives.
    3. Is there a FS which is easy and pretty safely resizeable, in case I want to grow/shrink the RAIDs? ext4?
    4. I want to create one big FS (ext4) and add there subfolders which will be shared in my network (e.g. Pictures, VMs, Owncloud, Backups, ...) so they grow dynamically in size. Is this possible? As far as I understand this works with FS, but does it also with folders in the FS (to have the flexibility)? Is this the shared folder point?
    5. I started OMV as a VM and built a RAID of several small virtual HDDs (see screenshot).

    But now I can't add the Raid 1 to the Raid 5. Is this a bug or a normal behavior? I guess it's normal and you can't add a RAID to a RAID. Afterwards I wanted to try LVM, but all the dropdown menus don't work (or have no content). Do you have an idea how to 'connect' these two RAIDs?


    Q - Plugins:
    6. Which protocol should I use if I want to share data between Windows and Linux PCs, but also Android devices?
    7. I tried NFS and SMB, but in both cases I can see the services in my network, but I get either " Connection refused" (Network) or "Connection refused" (SMB) on my Ubuntu PC. But as far as I know I set both up to allow everything. Do I have to forward any port out of my VM?


    Regards,


    Fhnx

  • 1. yes
    2. you should have no problem growing it
    3. ext4
    4. The folders are not really dynamic but if you do not put quotas on them they will be allowed to grow in size as you want. The only limitation being the size of the file system.
    5. @ryecoaaron
    6. If it is media use plex or emby. With data explain more and how much data. Do you want to sync folders? You do not say enough.
    7. This post will give you a good idea how to setup a SMB share:
    How to make a good Media share for Emby and PlexMediaServer

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Add raid to a raid or using lvm is not something most users need to do. What are you trying to accomplish?

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  • I ordered the Hardware already it should come next week. You can see the Hardware below.


    @tekkb
    Thats what I hoped for. Thank you for your confirmation.


    Add raid to a raid or using lvm is not something most users need to do. What are you trying to accomplish?


    Since I can't buy just a bunch of WD REDs, I want to achieve the (needed) RAID size with my existing disks. My plan is to replace them, as they die, with REDs. If I build a RAID with 3 TB disks I can't add my 2x 2TB to that RAID. This is why I want to create a RAID 0 to have one big 4TB "drive" and add this to the RAID. An alternative to use these these drives would be that I create a RAID 1 of the two 2TB drives and add them to one big LVM, JBOD or something like that.


    My goals for the Raid and Filesystem is the best €/Tb with the following boundary conditions:

    • Since my drives are used I want to prevent data loss if one drive dies*
    • My requirements are surely changing in the future, so is hardware. I want a flexible system to which I can add and remove drives as flexible as possible. E.g. add a RAID 6 of 4TB drives if they are cheap enough, change to SSDs or other technologies in the future

    Example: I found out that it is possible to "grow" a RAID 5 to a RAID 6. Perhaps I'm going to do that too, if I have anough space left.


    * not as a replacement of backups, but for reducing the propability (and by this frequency) of data loss

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I think you should try a unionfilesystem (there is a plugin) instead of multiple raid arrays and lvm mixed together. You could add snapraid for redundancy. This combination will work much better than what you seem to be planning and is supported much better in the web interface.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


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    • Offizieller Beitrag

    LVM is great when you are getting your disk space from a SAN. Otherwise, I have no idea why people use it.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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  • I think you should try a unionfilesystem (there is a plugin) instead of multiple raid arrays and lvm mixed together. You could add snapraid for redundancy. This combination will work much better than what you seem to be planning and is supported much…


    Thanks for that tip. That sounds like pretty much that what I was looking for. Do you have any experience with that config, because I have some questions:

    • I still have to format my drives which I want to add since I want to use ext4 and they are formatted in NTFS ( :rolleyes:), right?
    • How do you solve the problem of non-realtime parity?

      • Do you trigger it every night?
      • What happens if i build my parity, then change a file and then a disk crashes? Is that file lost? The parity should be out of date, or not?
      • I found this and this[GER] How-To, but neither explains how often to trigger the parity build

    LVM is great when you are getting your disk space from a SAN. Otherwise, I have no idea why people use it.


    I've seen one guy in 4 years on the forum give some good reasons for using it on a RAID. I can't remember what they were but it was interesting.


    I tried it in my test VM and it didn't work. So I don't like it either :D

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    1 - Yep, you still format each disk with ext4.


    2 - Schedule snapraid sync. You can do that in the plugin.
    1 - I would trigger it every night or twice daily depending on how often you change your files. I would also manually run it whenever you make large changes.
    2 - Depends on which disk. If it is the disk with the file on it, you would lose your changes. The original should be able to be recreated.


    3 - snapraid sync is the main thing you need. You can execute /usr/sbin/omv-snapraid-diff which uses the settings on the settings tab for more features.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I don't actually use snapraid but I think you would set a nightly job to run the diff script with scrub frequency to 3 days. The script will sync every night but only scrub every 3 days.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

    Please put your OMV system details in your signature.
    Please don't PM for support... Too many PMs!

  • Hi,


    my hardware came yesterday and now I'm in the middle of copying and configuring the server.
    My SMB and my SSH works perfectly.
    But I have some trouble with NFS. It worked perfectly until I did an update and installed the backport kernels. Now I don't even see the NFS-share in Nautilus in "Browse Network" (But I see the SMB and SSH shares). I googled for some troubleshooting help, but in essence i found only to check the config file (/etc/exports), which seems to be fine and to check the processes, which seem to run. Do you have any idea why SMB works and NFS worked until some point and now NFS does not work any more?


    Furthermore I'm looking for some backup-tool to backup data. At the moment CrashPlan seems to look good, because it supports Linux and Windows and has a data recovery like "Time Machine" with multiple versions to choose from. What do you think?

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