Criticise my spec / do I need RAID?

Hi all, I'm new to OMV and NAS in general. In order to gain familiarity, I tinkered with some old hardware which I thought I could re-purpose. My sig shows the hardware that I'm using. I've been away from the tech scene for quite a while so I don't really know what good looks like.

What are your thoughts? Is this a highly inefficient setup for a NAS? What is considered a good spec?

I have ordered two 8TB WD Red disks (16TB total). I have about 2TB worth of important data that I don't want to lose.. the rest is just media. Do I need RAID? Is my spec sufficient for a NAS? OMV works well so I think it is okay, however, I don't want to start using it in anger only to realise that I have a critical point of failure somewhere. Few more details:

- I've installed USB Backup - this works very well. I intend to backup my important data fortnightly or so. My issue with USB Backup is that the hard drive that I attach to the NAS always stays on. To counter this, I intend to manually connect the hard drive every 2 weeks, run USB backup overnight, then disconnect the drive in the morning.

- I intend to install syncthing (is this the most popular option?) in order to use the nas as a centralised file server to my laptop/PC/Mobile (in order to get away from dropbox)

- I'm presently using NFS. Should I be using ZFS?

Apologies for all the questions and muddled post. Hope this makes sense! Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks,
RS

Zitat von fadumpt

Your specs seem fine, I have a 5 person company setup on an very slow atom with OMV installed to a compact flash card and they've been fine for at least 2 years now. I'm not a huge fan of mirrored RAID and when I setup my new OMV box in the next couple days I plan on having my important data on a 1TB drive and then setting up RSYNC to keep it backed up to a second 1TB drive. Not sure if this will be any better or worse then a mirror, but it's something to look in to.

If possible, you might want to consider putting the 2TB of data you *need* on a separate drive and then back it up to something else (like another drive)
Otherwise, just mirror or rsync the 8TB drives.

Thanks for the response! I like the idea of using Rsync to mirror my important data from drive 1 to drive 2. At least I'd have a backup of what I can't afford to lose (in addition to my external USB backup!)

Zitat von vl1969

let's go one at a time
what you have :
DFI Lanparty nForce4 SLI-DR
running Opteron 165 Dual Core (no overclock)
with 4GB Corsair Non-ECC DDR400 RAM

I assume Non-RAID: 1x100GB IDE is for OS (OMV)
DATA:
2x 250GB SATA
1x 4TB SATA
and 2x8TB is coming and plan for.

if all you need/want is NAS this is a decent spec, however if you think you might want to do something else on the box, like running a PLEX server, Owncloud etc. , depending on what that would be, you might want to get more RAM ,if supported, or think of a better MB/CPU/RAM now. although with OMV like with most Linux distros, moving to a better box maybe easy but still not fun.

"- I'm presently using NFS. Should I be using ZFS?" this confuses me on so many levels. what do you mean by this?

NFS - is a special file system for network sharing data
ZFS - is a real block device type File system, like NTFS,FAT/FAT32, EXE3/4,XFS, BTRFS
you can not format a hard drive with NFS but you can with all the FS mentioned above

to share your data you can use NFS or SMB/SAMBA
for special cases you also have things like CIFS and mergerFS nad AUOFS(I hope I spell it right)

to prepare your disks for store data you would use any FS mentioned above (well since we are using Linux, you would use any that are Linux based, EXE3/4,XFS, BTRFS, ZFS )

Do you NEED raid? well the answer is "it depends".
since we know you have and plan for good backup data safety and security is not in question here.
ask your self : is uptime and data accessibility important for me?
if answer is yes, than raid is a good solution. it also helps with data safety and security.

why?
well
#1. with properly configured raid, and if your hardware supports hot-plug of drives, you can recover from drive failure without your server ever going down and your data ever be inaccessible for long or at all.

#2. with raid, you have a lesser chance of data loss since with raid, your setup keeps running and you have a chance of getting the data out before whole thing is down.

#3. along with #2, your data is kept accessible while you recover the hardware failure for the most part.

so you decide.

FYI>> you have many options for raid nowadays. if you have not keep yourself up to date with what is new and cutting edge, you do not need hardware raid any more. you can use software raid which is available in any Linux distro (mdadm)
you also can use the raid options built into the ZFS and BTRFS.
yes this two file systems have raid type functionality built right into the FS. even more BTRFS actually allows you to build different raid setups using disks of different size, and also allows you to convert from one raid level to another on the fly on a mounted volume. as it is stands now BTRFS stable implementation supports RAID 0, 1, 10
level 5 and 6 are supported but still in development and not stable.

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Thanks for the detailed response! Unfortunately, I've maxed out the RAM my mobo will support. I am running Syncthing (this is different from owncloud right? Or do they do different things?). I don't run Plex or do server side encoding though.

You're quite right, I got confused. I'm using the ext4 file system (not NFS!). I was considering to use ZFS if going down the RAID route, but you've presented an interesting point re. BTRFS.

Your thoughts on RAID are really useful. I think I'll choose to do RAID at a later date when I have a better box with more disks. But for now, I think that I'd be able to live with losing media but not important files for which I'll Rsync between drives and backup to a USB external drive

Zitat von vl1969

IMHO, if your choice is anything less than a good quality dedicated RAID card, especially for your current config, it is not worth it. as well as using anything other than Linux software raid options you have.

keep in mind though, that even if you do choose a good quality dedicated raid card, that by choosing a specific card you are tying your self to that setup.
if card go bad, your options for recovery is limited if any.
if, on the other hand, you go with Linux based soft. raid option like mdadm, or ZFS or BTRFS
any time you want to move to different distro or different hardware, it should be as easy as pooling the drives out the current system and adding them to the new one and mount.
if the new distro supports the version of raid soft used it should just mount the set and make it available .

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Is software RAID more demanding on CPU/RAM? I have Sil3114 and nForce4 hardware RAID (which to my understanding are not very good at all).

I was merely thinking that my NAS box spec is fairly low as it is. As a result, anything that I can do to minimise the load is probably a good thing.

On a separate note, I'm beginning to wonder about how to check the new HD's before using them in anger. Do you know of any easy way of using Seatools to check new HD's? My nas box has only OMV installed. I didn't install any other OS. I haven't got any experience with virtualbox - would this be the way to go?

Thank you for commenting on the spec I

I couldn't comment on the average load at the moment (no idea), but I'll be using it as a centralised data storage hub to access files, folders, and media. I will be BT syncing photos and files, but won't bother with the media.

Thanks for the link on testing the HD.. I attempted to run seatools (pia). Now I'm using the article that you provided - very useful!