Pool Hard Drives

  • I am really not to familiar with the ins and outs of OMV. My goal was to download all my Bluray movies and keep them on the NAS. That is really the only thing I use OMV for. When I started I put in 4 Hard Drives and made them all separate so I could setup a windows folder for each hard drive. I gave each hard drive a name. For example Movies Watched, Movies Not Watched, 3D Movies, New Movies. When I watched a movie out of the new movies hard drive I would then move it from new movies to movies watched. Worked great at first but moving movies from one hard drive to another especially a 30 GB movie takes time. I have since changed my thought process and would like to pool all the hard drives together from the 4 hard drives. Is it possible to do this without losing all the movies on the 4 hard drives?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Is it possible to do this without losing all the movies on the 4 hard drives?

    Yep. Install the unionfilesystem plugin and add all drives to the pool. Then create a shared folder for the pool and share it via samba or whatever.

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


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  • Mergerfs is what you're looking for. If you want to combine entire drives, the plugin will work nicely. You can pool at the folder level but requires manual configuration. Do some searching for mergerfs, there are many threads on the subject.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    You can pool at the folder level but requires manual configuration.

    Most people don't really need this and I recommend against manual configuration.

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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  • Thank you guys for the quick replies. So if I use unionfilesystem all the drives will pool into 1 large drive? I will not lose any of my current movies? Will it make it less time consuming moving files between folders?

  • Also, what will happen when i add a new drive to the system? I built my own NAS for OMV. I have an option to add 2 more drives. Sorry for all the questions but lastly what happens if one of the drives fails?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    mergerfs works on top of existing filesystems. Creating a pool will not do anything to the files on the current filesystems. You can add/remove drives whenever you want. If a drive fails, you will just lose access to the files on that drive.


    As far as time to move between folders, it depends on your mergerfs policy and whether the files are actually moving to a different hard drive. If they move to a different hard drive, they will be slower.


    The mergerfs readme is very helpful for understanding how it works.

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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  • Thank you guys for the quick replies. So if I use unionfilesystem all the drives will pool into 1 large drive? I will not lose any of my current movies? Will it make it less time consuming moving files between folders?


    Also, what will happen when i add a new drive to the system? I built my own NAS for OMV. I have an option to add 2 more drives. Sorry for all the questions but lastly what happens if one of the drives fails?


    Yes, that is correct, all drives will be combined. You can still see and interact with individual drives, but there will also be a pool of all combined drives. Take some time to read about MergerFS and the different write policies. No data will be lost when setting up a pool.


    What I (and many mergerFS users) do is use SnapRAID to protect against data loss. Your largest drive will be set up as a parity drive, so that if one other drive fails, the data can be recovered.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    What I (and many mergerFS users) do is use SnapRAID to protect against data loss. Your largest drive will be set up as a parity drive, so that if one other drive fails, the data can be recovered.

    Just to add... I wouldn't put the snapraid parity drive in the mergerfs pool.

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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  • Thanks for the input. I have everything on a backup drive so if I lose something it is not that big of a deal. What I am most concerned about is data transfer speeds between folders. That apparently will not be fixed by using unionfilesystem. If i were to start over and not worry about what I currently have but would like quicker transfer speeds between folders how would you recommend I set that up?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    If i were to start over and not worry about what I currently have but would like quicker transfer speeds between folders how would you recommend I set that up?

    raid is about your only option.

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

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    • Offizieller Beitrag

    You grow the array to add a drive. Just a warning... raid has its share of issues especially for a newb.

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


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  • So what would you suggest I do? Main thing for this NAS is plex server. I have hundreds of movies on 4 disc drives but transfer between the drives frequently. Like I mentioned in my original above post I may move several movies at one time from one drive to the next. This takes forever using a PC and windows. I do not redundancy because I have a second set off drives at another location. Also, being a newbie is there a faster way to transfer data from a usb drive to OMV. Right now i plug it into my home pc and transfer over the network. I appreciate all the help by the way. Just have done this now for a couple of years and it seems like there is a better way but because I am a newbie I have always just done it how I know.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    This takes forever using a PC and windows. I do not redundancy because I have a second set off drives at another location.

    This is the problem... When you transfer a file between two physical hard drives using samba, the file will be transferred to the windows box and then to the omv box. If you transferred the files on the OMV box directly, it would be much quicker especially if you have slow networking. I don't move files with Windows much but maybe using mergerfs would keep this file transfer on the OMV box because samba thinks it is the same drive? Try it :)

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

    Please put your OMV system details in your signature.
    Please don't PM for support... Too many PMs!

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Once I install the mergerfs plugin is this a fairly simple setup?

    yes

    omv 7.0-32 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.9 | compose 7.0.9 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

    Please put your OMV system details in your signature.
    Please don't PM for support... Too many PMs!

  • Try using Midnight Commander via ssh to move files around on the same machine.


    From what I can tell the transfer itself does not happen over the network, but the visual progress indicator does of course. You can background the transfers to avoid the network traffic caused by the progress indicators.

    --
    Google is your friend and Bob's your uncle!


    OMV AMD64 7.x on headless Chenbro NR12000 1U 1x 8m Quad Core E3-1220 3.1GHz 32GB ECC RAM.

  • I will give this all a try. Like I said I haven't tried anything else because using windows was what I knew how to do, and yes the command line stuff is scary. I would have no idea how to do that. Is there some sort of a guide I can review?

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