Hi,
I'm planning on building a NAS that can hold around 150TB or so, incrementally. This NAS will be mainly used to store my media files and used to stream to at least 5 devices simultaneous [1080p Content, at least 6Mb bitrate] Via Emby-Kodi. Parity/Redundancy is an important factor.
Initial choice was to go with Freenas. Upon asking around, I found that SnapRaid suited my needs:
- It allowed incremental addition of hard disks.
- It has parity support [up to 6 disks].
- I can lose all the parity disks + any failed disk and the remaining data on healthy disk still can be accessed. [Is this true? Some says yes, some says no.]
- Cheaper compared to Freenas + easier to do overtime.
I have several questions regarding SnapRaid in OMV.
- The hardware requirement. The wiki states that Any i486 or amd64 + 1Gib or more RAM. What would be the best/optimum hardware for 4 simultaneous stream in Emby. I don't think trans-coding is involved. [Currently using Emby on my PC to Kodi on Raspberry Pi 2].
- In the event of hard disk failure, I just need to remove the hard disk > insert new one and it will start it's resilvering process?
- Is it better to build NAS with 3TB, 4TB or 6TB hard disks; factoring in the time to run Sync, Scrub and hard disk replacement.
- As for extra backup, I can create another server and have this server backup to my new server right? As an onsite backup.
- Do I need ECC RAM? Does SnapRaid automatically does error checksum if ECC-compatible hardware are used?
- Since I'm using SnapRaid, I don't need to dabble with the Storage Option on the Sidebar of OMV, right? Any addition/removal of hard disk is through SnapRaid plugin, am I correct?
- Drive Pooling. Is it a necessary thing? From my understanding, it just groups the drives to seem like one big drive, right? Do I lose anything by not drive pooling? If I need to drive pool, do I do that before SnapRaid or after?
- Regarding Sync and Scrub. Just for clarification. Once I transfer data into drives, I run Sync and that creates the parity bits and the contents, correct? The Scrub functions checks for any error and fixes them, correct? Is the Scrub affected by whether ECC is used or not?
Sorry for the long post. Any and every help/feedback is much appreciated.
Thank you.