Need to expand storage options

  • So I've done something silly and just piecemealed my drives as I've bought them. I have 4x 4TB disksx and 1x 2TB (for a total of 18TB of storage).


    Because of this piecemeal nature, my files are spread out (e.g., "Movies1" on Drive A, "Movies2" on Drive C, etc.). It can make things a little confusing.


    What I want to do is get an external RAID enclosure, fill it with 4x 4TB drives, put them together in RAID 5, and then go through the time-consuming task of copying and condensing my folders down into a new "TV/Series," "Movies," "Music" and "Comics" folders, while keeping my original drives in the NAS for backups, program settings, additional storage, etc.


    Is this a feasible upgrade path? Would I suffer for plugging my RAID enclosure into USB3 ports on my NAS housing? Is there a smarter way to do this?

  • It seems that the latest trend is to use SnapRAID combined with a union filesystem (such as mergerfs) rather than RAID5.

    • SnapRAID runs a cron-based parity check on your drives (every night for example). It isn't real-time like RAID, but it works well for media files.
    • mergerfs unifies your drives into a single filesystem. If you have folders with the same name, they are merged together in the unified filesystem, but you can still access the individual drives.

    Both SnapRAID and mergerfs are more flexible and reversible than setting up RAID5 array. Neither of them modify the filesystem or your data on your existing drives in any way, so each drive can be pulled out of the system and used normally and you can setup the array without wiping the drives.

  • so if I'm reading you right, I can simply install MergerFS and my four existing 4GB disks will be converted into a single disk as far as my OS is concerned, and I can then simply merge the directories?

  • Yes, but that alone won't give you any RAID-like redundancy. For that, you would need to set up SnapRAID, which requires that one of those 4TB disks is used for parity instead of data storage, so you'll get 12TB of storage (like you would in a RAID5 array).


    So you just install SnapRAID, declare 3 drives for data and 1 drive for parity. No need to reformat, or anything, but you need to set up a cron job to do a snapraid sync every night and a snapraid scrub every week.


    Then you install mergerfs on top of those 3 data drives and you're set.

  • Dunce moment ahead:


    how do I merge directories? Like, lets say I have Movies, Movies2, and Movies3.


    I can see in my shared folders dialogue that I have the "union filesystem" drive (which I have now renamed "Media") but also have my old shared folders. If I create new shared folders, can I just cp -R or drag-and-drop from my Windows machine?

  • You better off using an rsync with move option onto new share. Just ssh to cli and run rsync command. If I find my notes I will post the comand here, but you canjust google, moving files with rsync.
    It works great. I reorganized my storage last week to move all data onto the new mergerfs pool from multiple drives.


    Sent from my phone

    omv 3.0.56 erasmus | 64 bit | 4.7 backport kernel
    SM-SC846(24 bay)| H8DME-2 |2x AMD Opteron Hex Core 2431 @ 2.4Ghz |49GB RAM
    PSU: Silencer 760 Watt ATX Power Supply
    IPMI |3xSAT2-MV8 PCI-X |4 NIC : 2x Realteck + 1 Intel Pro Dual port PCI-e card
    OS on 2×120 SSD in RAID-1 |
    DATA: 3x3T| 4x2T | 2x1T

  • You better off using an rsync with move option onto new share. Just ssh to cli and run rsync command. If I find my notes I will post the comand here, but you canjust google, moving files with rsync.
    It works great. I reorganized my storage last week to move all data onto the new mergerfs pool from multiple drives.



    Just be careful with syntax. An extra '/' makes the difference between having files in proper folder or having your old folder moved into the new folder all together.
    Sent from my phone


    Sent from my phone

    omv 3.0.56 erasmus | 64 bit | 4.7 backport kernel
    SM-SC846(24 bay)| H8DME-2 |2x AMD Opteron Hex Core 2431 @ 2.4Ghz |49GB RAM
    PSU: Silencer 760 Watt ATX Power Supply
    IPMI |3xSAT2-MV8 PCI-X |4 NIC : 2x Realteck + 1 Intel Pro Dual port PCI-e card
    OS on 2×120 SSD in RAID-1 |
    DATA: 3x3T| 4x2T | 2x1T

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    SnapRAID isn't realtime. So, they can't be compared. SnapRAID runs when you want it to. RAID10 is probably faster in most cases because it stripes the read/writes.

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