Hello everyone. So an important moment is almost here regarding my NAS, and that moment is adding storage drives. I've been tinkering with OMV for a few weeks and have to say I'm pretty impressed and I'm definitely going to be keeping OMV as my OS for this box. Now comes the kind of scary part, adding storage drives...
I've concluded that I'm going to be using RAID 6. I was originally just going to jbod, then decided some parity would be nice so I said RAID 5, but I've read a few horror stories regarding large drives and read error rates and basically RAID 5 is obsolete. I chose 6 for the double parity and hopefully better odds at recovering the array should a HDD fail on me. Anyhow, is these steps basically what I'd do to get up and running once I've installed the drives? I'm going to start off with 5 8TB drives for now.
1) Format the drives with the ext4 (should I opt for xfs instead?)
2) Encrypt the drives with luks (will drives automatically unlock upon reboot?)
3) Create the raid 6 array.
One thing I've read mixed responses with is expanding. My NAS holds 8 bays, but am starting off with 5 HDD's. When the time comes for me to add the last three drives, will I be able to do so and expand the array without relative difficulty, or will I have to start from scratch and rebuild entire array? Bear in mind I'm pretty nix illiterate (trying to learn slowly though) and would much prefer a GUI to help me should and troubleshooting and/or maintenance issues arise.
Also should a drive fail, how would I go about swapping it? Pop in new one, format, encrypt then rebuild? Thanks and sorry if a few of these questions seem well..ignorant