Suggestions on setup

    I'm new to OMV and I'd like to have everyone rate my setup and offer any suggestions for what I'm trying to accomplish. I started the search for an open source NAS after my wife's business computer had a hard drive crash and my 2TB media NAS (single drive) crap out within a week of each other. Now, I'm not necessarily looking for a huge amount of storage. Data integrity is higher on my "wants" list than capacity. My initial thoughts were to just add all my hard drives into a RAID array but after reading through this forum, the consensus appears to be that RAID is not the end-all-be-all for data integrity. I'd also like to grow the capacity at some point but for now, the drives I have will be sufficient.


    I have 6 HDs in all; 2 - 2TB and 4 - 1TB.


    My thoughts are to put 3 of my 1TBs into a RAID5 array so I could survive with a single drive failure which would give me a total of 2TB of storage. The 4th, unused 1TB would be used in case one of the production drives fails. The 2TB drives would be put into a RAID1 array, again for 2TB of space. The RAID5 array would be my primary data drive where we would place all of our files. I would then create an Rsync job to regularly backup the RAID5 data over to the RAID1.


    Am I on the right track? Can anyone offer any suggestions that would be better practice?


    One of my main concerns with my setup (which I failed to mention earlier) is that I'm running the underlying OS from a USB stick. The USB is a higher quality so I'm hoping to get long use out of it. I went with USB for the OS because I needed all my available SATA ports for the storage drives. Are there any suggestions for what can be done to ensure the system will remain running in the event the USB stick goes out?


    Thanks everyone.

    Hello Chad


    I too am new to OMVand Linux and was in a similar situation as you are in now. This isalso my first post. I found OMV by accident and have been playingwith it and learning about it with the help of “Google” and theforums. I’m sure others will chime in shortly with some suggestionsfor you but they will probably want to know your machine’s specs.


    Media:
    There are severalstorage solution plug ins that you can use for your set up if yourconcerned about data integrity. Lets start with your media storage.You mentioned that you would like to be able to add more storage andI assume your talking about your growing media library. The mostrecommended solution for this that I have come across and that makessense is “SnapRaid” Although this is whats recommended I’mcurrently using raid 5 for my media.


    Wifes work:
    The other storagesolution for you that I think would be what your looking for is “ZFS”This solution requires 8GB ECC ram. This will stir up somediscussions for sure after what I’m about to say. I like others amnot rich nor did I have any lying around to experiment with so I’musing regular ram. While doing my research I came across severalpostings in other forums that recommend restarting your computer oncea week while using regular ram and scrub once a month,(this methodhad hit and miss reviews, every ones mileage varied) I do once aweek scrub, along with external rsync back up and on line back up,currently “CrashPlan”


    Now for your OSdrive, I am currently playing with a machine using USB and a back upor two would be strongly recommended and don’t forget to installthe “Flash Memory” plug in and set it up properly. I haveinstalled “Clonzilla” and after configuring my machine I clonedmy flash drive to another same size drive for back up. I have alsofound that when ever you make any chances and don’t want to writethem down, re-clone your back up drive.


    I hope this helpssome and starts a discussion for you.

    Zitat von Wrenchit2

    “ZFS”This solution requires 8GB ECC ram

    No. Doesn't become more true if repeated over and over again. While it's a reasonable recommendation neither the 8GB nor the ECC DRAM is a hard requirement for ZFS. It would be really nice if people could stop copy&pasting wrong information from the past over and over again.

    Zitat von Wrenchit2

    I stand corrected and I thank you for correcting me and the new knowledge I have just gained.

    Nah, could've been me just babbling so a reference and an explanation :)

    • Why ZFS is the better choice even if one doesn't want to afford ECC DRAM (and why the 'scrub of death' is a myth): http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/wi…n-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/
    • The 'you need at least 8GB DRAM for ZFS' is official FreeNAS requirement (which I can understand from a support point of view since most users never read the fineprint and you simply don't want to deal with the same support questions over and over again)

    Simplified speaking: with many/most use cases ZFS gets the faster the more ARC cache is available. And this 'ARC cache' is physical memory AKA DRAM. Then some ZFS features do only work well as long as the data structures fit into physical available memory (again that's DRAM), for example deduplication.


    That being said I currently play around with ZFS on almost toy grade hardware (an ARM board with a 32-bit dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU and just 1 GB non-ECC DRAM). 4 disk RAID-Z performance is higher than with probably 99% of OMV installations out there using RAID5 with 64-bit Intel boxes while I've to admit that I'm not even close to understand all the 'ZFS on Linux' tunables currently :)


    Back to the purpose of this thread: Since the idea to think about an improved storage setup resulted from data losses I would focus on backup first. RAID in its primitive variants is mostly about availability (though the higher RAID levels 5 and 6 provide also some data integrity features due to parity data). I'm a big fan of modern concepts like checksumming (data integrity), snapshots and the ability to transfer them fast and easily to other disks/hosts (backup functionality and desaster recovery preparation) and that's the reason I would always set on at least a zmirror combined with znapzend (and since I love my data the main host I use to store all important data/projects is equipped with ECC DRAM).


    Wrt modern vs anachronistic storage attempts you'll find a lot of pros for the former in this thread and also a lot of cons (I usually forget about since ZFS fanboi since ages) here.

    Why not create Raiz2 with 4 drives? Or Raidz with 4 drives,for added performance.Than on another computer you stick 2x2TB and rsync/zsend/zsync whatever you want to do. The ,when time comes,you replace drives with bigger ones(not add drives,that harder and complex) and grow you Raid. That's what i would do.

    Zitat von tkaiser

    Why ZFS is the better choice even if one doesn't want to afford ECC DRAM (and why the 'scrub of death' is a myth): jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-…n-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/

    Thank you for this link, it made a lot of sense and wasn't over my head in explanation.


    Zitat von tkaiser

    The 'you need at least 8GB DRAM for ZFS' is official FreeNAS requirement (which I can understand from a support point of view since most users never read the fineprint and you simply don't want to deal with the same support questions over and over again)

    This is where I got the information when I began exploring 'ZFS' and you are correct, I didn't read the fine print.


    Again thank you for pointing this out to me and taking your time to explain my miss understanding

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