Recently I decided to build a simple OMV setup to be used as a Rsync Server for my (Freenas) file server. The Nas I used for this, being a simple and not all that powerful Zyxel, had some trouble handling the Rsync jobs. Building the box and Installing OMV happened to be a simple job. But things got a bit strange (to me anyway) when I connected the 2 x 4 TB HDU's I retrieved from the Zyxel and added them to the OMV box. As I had them cleaned (I wanted a fresh start) I could see them at once listed in the RAID management tab. Setting up a mirror was easy. Now for the things that I found a bit odd:
- As soon as I saved the mirror a resyncing process was started. As I know better then to interrupt it somehow, I left it alone. It took over 12 hours to complete this before the mirror was marked "Clean". I don't understand what that is all about as the disks were clean and there was no data at all (or even a file system) to sync anyway. Is this normal behavior?
- Looking at the overview of the mirror I expected to see three devices. Two of them representing the physical devices and one of them representing the mirrored device. But there are 4 devices in the list and the presented capacities on three of the four devices make no sens to me. Only the capacity of the mirrored device makes sens as that is 3.64 TB which is about what I expected to see. I have made a screenprint of the overview of the raid (see attached file). The column labels are in Dutch, sorry for that, but I hope they speak for them self.
Just to be a bit more confident I have performed a long smart self test on both of the disks and no errors were reported. If somebody out there is able to explain what I see I would appreciate that very much. Most likely it is me being a noob, but I like to be sure before I trust this with my backups. Everything seems to work ok and it is my intention to add a filesystem to the raid as soon as I finish this submission.