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.