Hello forum!
My current OMV server currently has only one 1 TB HDD for my data (Data1), which I regularly back up to an external USB HDD. OMV runs on a separate SDD. Since the HDD is getting slowly full, I wanted to move to a HDD pool + SnapRaid to make it easy to expand the storage in the future. However, I have a few doubts regarding the best way to create the pool, and how to migrate my current system to minimize the work required.
Creating the pool
My current HDD is at roughly 70% of its capacity. I wanted to simply add a new HDD, create a pool and that's it. However, since the old HDD is mostly full, even if I set UnionFS policy to "most free space", the majority of the data will be still in the old HDD. My rationale here is that I would like to have the data evenly distributed between the drives to gain a little in read/write performance. I have 2-3 users using the server, and having the data spread across the drives should should improve the performance of the HDD pool. Therefore, from the following options what would be the best?
1. Keep the old drive as it is, add a new drive to the pool and set UnionFS policy to "most free space".
2. Backup the data from the old drive, erase it, create a pool with the old and new drives, and copy the data again to the pool. UnionFS policy: most free space.
3. Keep the old drive as it is, add a new drive, move some data to the new drive; and finally create a pool (UnionFs policy: most free space).
Renaming the HDD pool
Another concern that I have is renaming the pool. I have several services running, all of them using the name of my current HDD drive. When I create the pool in UnionFS, how does it work with the name of the pool? For example, my music folder is under /srv/VeryLongHDDName/Music. My Plex library is linked to that folder. When I create the HDD pool, how can I update the location of my music folder without having to rebuild my Plex library? Is it possible to simply update the location of the music library and Plex Database?
Thanks for the advice!