Hey all. After running OMV on a barebones Intel server board (S3200SH-LC) with a single dual-core processor and 4G of RAM in a Chenbro case with 4 hotswap bays, and another 5 added via a Supermicro 5-in-3 chassis, I came across a deal on Craigslist I could not pass up.
For $150, I got:
Dell PowerVault 600 (Basically a PowerEdge 2900) rackmount server
Dual power supplies
8 hot swap SAS/SATA bays
8 750G SATA drives
2 Intel Xeon 5405 Quad-core 2Ghz processors
24G ram
Dell PERC 6/i
I got it home this afternoon, and immediately booted it up to ensure it works, ran the Dell diagnostics in quick test mode, and it passed with flying colors.
After contacting the gentleman last night, and prior to buying it today, I had been looking for other's people experiece with OMV on the Dell Poweredge servers. Some said it went just fine, some said they had headache getting OMV to recognize the drives.
Well, I wanted, and was hoping , to do JBOD on the PERC, and just do software RAID in OMV. Turns out, I cannot do that, or at least it doesn't look like it supports it. If anyone can tell me different, please let me know. I have discovered that it is an LSI SAS1078 under the Dell branding.
So, for now I have it set up as each drive in their own, single-drive, RAID 0 container, which is what has been suggested by a lot of other people.
I really couldn't have asked for the install to go much easier. I added an 80G SATA laptop hard drive that I knew was functional to the open SATA port on the board, and have it, for now, just resting in the open space above the hot swap bays. I hope to be able to track down the floppy drive bracket that goes to this series of servers at some point, and add a 2.5-3.5 adapter and have it permanently mounted. Once fully set up, it will be going into my rack anyway, so shouldn't be a big deal to leave it like that long term.
I then went into the BIOS, set the boot order to be the laptop drive over the PERC card, and the CD ROM before the laptop drive. Plopped the CD of OMV into the drive, rebooted, and it booted right into the installer, with no issues.
Installed OMV, and then went into the WebUI and set the first 4 750's to be a 2.04T RAID 5 volume. It is currently about 40% done initializing, then I can create sahred folders and set this bad boy up. I will be removing the other 4 750's, and they will be replacements for if the 8 year old drives I kept in it decide to die. I will be putting in three 2T drives as a RAID 5 volume, as well as a 1T drive without RAID for non important, system type stuff (virtual box machine images, as I plan to use it for testing purposes, Transmission download directory, any other plugins that might require a temp space, etc).
That will give me a total of 7Tb of storage space, of which all but 1Tb will be redundant. I plan on getting a PCI-E eSTA card soon to plop in a drive bay, so that I can get an external eSATA enclosure or two, and do backups periodically (not much changes on most of it, I have offsite backup of all personal documents and photos).
I want to hear some input from you guys, though - I know that hardware RAID is superior to software RAID typically. I get it, I really do. However, I do not and likely would not have the fund to purchase a space PERC card if this one went south. Is there any real harm in doing it the way I have done it, and putting the drive in a single-driove RAID 0 on the PERC card, could I access my data if needed without a PERC card, or is there still the RAID info written to the drives like there would be if I had used the hardware RAID 5 feature of the PERC card? also, any other considerations about this setup overall that I may be overlooking?
Thanks for reading, and possibly commenting.-