RAID vs Individual Drives

    For about 3 years now, I have simply been running my OMV server like a computer - Single independent ext4 formatted drives. When one gets full, I add another. Repeat.


    Performance has been fine, and I like the simplistic approach like owning a PC. Best of all, no space is wasted. If I have 25 TB of hard drives, I get 25 TB of file storage.


    However, lately I have had drives suddenly crashing on me, with data loss, and it's made me reconsider RAID.


    If I have 25 TB of data that I want to store, how many drives and how much space would I need to set up RAID? I think the other daunting thing about RAID is that there are so many styles and types (not to mention hardware and software) and I can never seem to find the answer to what the right kind of RAID is for me.


    If I switched I would expect that if one of my drives crashed, I could pull it, put in a replacement, and 0 data would be lost. Otherwise, I don't see a huge benefit in doin git.


    So, which RAID is right for me under OMV (storing and streaming media files in my home, and downloading new ones via plugins is all my OMV box does)? And how much actual drive space would I need to store 25TB of actual data?


    Thanks, I love OMV and appreciate the advice.

    First of all, RAID is not backup. You use RAID for high availability and fault tolerance, but it doesn't protect you against data corruption or accidentally deleting a file.


    How many drives you need depends on the size of your drives.


    If your files are mostly multimedia files that don't change too much, then you should consider SnapRAID. SnapRAID isn't really RAID, it's a sort of backup that uses RAID-like parity to recover your files if a drive dies. You have data disks and parity disks. The number of parity disks depends on the number of data drives. There are several sites out there that describe the basics. You can combine SnapRAID with mergerfs, which combines all the drives into one single pooled file system for convenience.

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