I am new to OMV having just switched from a Windows 7 box with about 30TB of media. I have fully upgraded my server, now running dual Xeon in a 12 bay Supermicro with another 12bay Supermicro connected through my HBA. On my old system I had no form of RAID, I simply used drivepool to merge all my disks together and literally had a one for one swap in case any of the drives failed. I have continued that type of setup with my new OMV build, and I am trying to understand why I may want to use SnapRAID or if I would even get any benefit out of it. I understand if a drive fails I can toss in a blank one, click rebuild and poof a few hours (or days) later and all my data is magically back. But if I am already running a one for one swap it would be quicker to just toss in the “backup” drive and poof I am back up in running in a matter of minutes. Now I just have to get another blank disk and back up the back up. The only real advantage I could see is if I had not backed up my drives after ripping a few movies or uploading new photos. In either case my photos are still on the cloud and well the movies I could re rip if need be. So is there really any point to run SnapRAID in my case and if so what is it? Right now I do have it setup, but all I keep thinking is, I am giving up a drive and drive bay that could be used for more storage.
Second question, when I am ripping movies (ones I own I might add) I use another desktop (my OMV rig does not have an optical drive option), is it possible to directly connect those two via 10GBe cards to speed up the transfer process, while still keeping the normal Gig lan in place? I know it can be done in Windows, but am not that familiar with Linux (yet) nor OMV.
Thanks for your input
Jay