I saw the "thoughts on RAID" thread and apparently can't comment there. But I resonated with the perspectives presented there and have questions.
I'm an independent software dev and have had RAID 1 running on my main workstation for years (windows 7, intel software raid). I've wanted RAID because if a disk dies I have a working machine and just need to rebuilt the array with a new participant disk. It has been a good premis.
OTOH I have found that with my very intermittent 'hands on' with RAID config, it can be dicey whenever I do need to deal with RAID issues. From this angle, RAID introduces risk. Also, if my machine crashes (bsod kind of things) the RAID array rebuild time is hard to live through (two 1.5 TB disks), as it consumes a lot of RAM and cpu cycles.
I've started to think I'll go RAID-less on my next workstation. SSD (which I have never touched to date) are getting big enough and are apparently less likely to fail than spindle drives. I have not figured out whether it'd be safe enough to trust the SSD to the degree that I could drop raid, but I hope I can work it out. Backups have to be regular and tested, of course.
I'm a new OMV user and today I started the machine up for the first time in almost a week. I had created a RAID 10 array (4 - 4 TB disks) thinking speed and resilience, and that a NAS would have few crashes and that rebuilts would be rare. But I see that for some reason my array is resyncing...I guess that means rebuilding the array. This and the 'thoughts about raid' thread and my own cautions about RAID have me wondering if I ought to forgo RAID on the NAS and take another route to ensure durability of the data stored on the NAS.
If I don't use RAID on the NAS and a disk fails and that's my only copy of the data then I'd be bummed. The OMV non-RAIDers out there must have the same concerns. So what do you do? You have two NAS units?