OMV hardware raid yes or no

  • I'm no stranger to NAS setups, I've been using FreeNAS for years. I'm also well aware that ZFS and other types of software raid options controlled by the OS itself are usually best in these types of scenarios. However, I have a situation where software raid is not an option, and I've been getting conflicting information from my peers and the internet so I thought I would just ask here.


    Is hardware raid fine in OMV or will that be an issue?


    A good friend of mine who is extremely experienced with this kind of thing is telling me OMV won't work with hardware raid at all, but here on the forums it looks like it will be fine. I have an old HP DL320s G1 with 12 300GB SAS hard drives and a 4GB SSD for the boot drive. The onboard raid card does NOT support JBOD, so that is a no-go. My intent was to set up a big RAID 6 which should give me a little over 2.6TB of usable drive space... Again, just want to know if using hardware raid will cause an issue with OMV


    I really appreciate any info, and I apologize if this question has been asked before, it's hard to find a solid YES or NO sometimes, especially when some threads just derail after the first "RAID ISN'T A BACKUP" post

  • Of course it will work but the consensus these days is to shy away from hardware raid. The hardware is a point of failure.

    I simply do not have the choice in this particular instance, as the raid controller appears to be proprietary, as is the hard drive backplane. I appreciate the information though, at least now I know it will work. I'll check and see if there is a way for me to use a different SAS card that will allow for JBOD, but until then I'll go with hardware RAID 6


    Thanks again!

  • Is hardware raid fine in OMV or will that be an issue?

    I think it should not be an issue in principle. It depends on the driver support for your specific raid controller in the Debian version which OMV is based on.
    I remember a thread here, that disks connected to a hardware raid controller are seen in OMV as one big disk. And it is also suggested to use a battery backup module with the raid controller in general.

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    • Offizieller Beitrag

    As long as there are drivers for the raid card, it should work fine. And if there are no drivers, most likely you can install/compile them yourself.


    Check for compability with Debian. OMV is built on top of Debian.


    Note that OMV will not help you to administer and maintain the hardware RAID. You will have to use other tools to do that.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    A good friend of mine who is extremely experienced with this kind of thing is telling me OMV won't work with hardware raid at all

    OMV is just a web frontend to Debian. Debian works just fine with hardware raid. It presents one (or more) block device(s) to the OS. Assuming it doesn't present the device with an unsupported device file (very low chance of this, the output of fdisk -l would be helpful for me to guarantee if it will work or not), OMV will happily format the device and allow you to mount it. SMART won't work since each device isn't passed through but you most likely could install something on the command line to view that.

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  • Thank you everyone for the replies! As far as managing the array, I'm using iLO for remote management, and it lets me identify bad disks, as well as blink the corresponding light on the front of the server, so that is a non-issue. Someone brought up battery backups, and the raid card does have a battery, and I've also got the server hooked up to a small 600VA UPS. As for SMART data, I'm 99% sure the iLO can grant me access to that, but even if it doesn't, it will at least inform me of bad drives. As for my friend who was supposedly super knowledgeable, he STILL insists it won't work, but I have since successfully gotten OMV installed and it appears to work fine.


    I was originally going to go with FreeNAS, but this server doesn't meet the minimum requirements for FreeNAS, hence why I'm using OMV.


    Thanks again everyone!

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    As for my friend who was supposedly super knowledgeable, he STILL insists it won't work

    As someone who has used hardware raid cards on OMV (even multiple cards in one machine) since the beginning of OMV (0.2), tell him he is wrong. Hell, I even wrote the openmediavault-hwraid plugin because it worked.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | 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!

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