Best practice for drive setup on a new build

1. offizieller Beitrag

    I've been reading a LOT about OMV the last few days and I'm ready to get busy. The docker stuff is amazing and I'm going to migrate my emby setup to the OMV machine when all is said and done. Since I'm starting new I'd like to do this right the first time...


    I notice a lot of people balk at using a USB drive for boot. That doesn't bother me with the flash plugin. I built a test setup last night to poke around and used an SD card and once it boots the interface is plenty fast. With that in mind I believe Techno Dad Life liked a USB for boot, an SSD for scratch/downloads/whatever and then big drives for media etc. Tell me if I have this right...


    USB is just Debian and OMV and extras/plugins. Uses 8 gig regardless of drive size.
    SSD is for docker containers/app data and downloads and things that will be used locally on that machine or moved around to media shares.
    Media share drives are obvious.


    Is that pretty much right? I watched the Techno Dad Life video on one drive setup and it seems to me I could use a variation of that to install OMV to the SSD, repartition, use the rest of the SSD as originally planned (scratch, downloads that will be moved, etc), then the big drives for data and media.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I don't use a scratch drive... Even with medioocre storage drives (5400) my data accesses plenty fast enough for me. I don't use Plex or Emby anymore, as I found I liked just pointing Kodi at a network share much much better. I do a good bit of torrent downloading, and even moving large downloads from my download location (just on my general storage drives, no SSD) to the appropriate folder is fine for me. Ymmv.


    I'm not a fan of having the os and data on the same disk. I know a lot of folks do it, but I think part of the beauty of the OS is it is completely isolated from your data.

    I've always had a scratch drive for seeding torrents and downloads and whatever else is considered non-essential. I'm really starting to lean towards installing OMV and that scratch on a spare SSD I have and just have 2 data drives. Thanks for the input.

    • Offizieller Beitrag
    Zitat von Driven

    I could use a variation of that to install OMV to the SSD, repartition, use the rest of the SSD as originally planned (scratch, downloads that will be moved, etc)

    I've been using USB thumbdrives as boot drives for years, with no problems, using the flash memory plugin of course. In this respect, I agree with KM0201 and @TechnoDadLife - separating the boot drive from data drive(s) makes recovery of either far easier. And if the OS is on a USB thumbdrive, cloning it for backup is dirt simple and low cost - cheap insurance.


    Zitat von Driven

    With that in mind I believe Techno Dad Life liked a USB for boot, an SSD for scratch/downloads/whatever and then big drives for media etc. Tell me if I have this right...

    I don't see anything wrong with what you're proposing.


    While some love them, outside of a potential home for VM's, I don't see any practical reason to use an SSD in a home NAS. For a first destination for downloads, where the bottle neck is the WAN connection, even a slow 2.5" laptop drive would do the trick (as a scratch drive). A spinning drive is also fine for Dockers as well. Dockers are really small, barebones, so they load fast and once they're running in memory, the speed of the drive they load from doesn't make much of a difference, performance wise.


    With a nod to personal preferences, again, there's nothing wrong with what you have in mind.

    Cool - thanks for the info. I know I can get by without an SSD but the first rule around here seems to be use what you got :D . I have a source for free, lightly used, older parts and a 128 SSD is on that list. If I can get my hands on the i5-6500 SFF box I want it has one 2.5 and two 3.5 bays for mounting so the SSD would work perfectly here. I also have an i5 laptop but it would require USB 3.0 enclosures for the drives plus it's slower for the emby transcoding. IDK... I'm still kicking around ideas but like I said I'm going to use what I have laying around.

    • Offizieller Beitrag
    Zitat von Driven

    I know I can get by without an SSD but the first rule around here seems to be use what you got .

    Absolutely. Learn on something that's either cheap or free. If you find that what you have works for you, great. If you find you need something better, at least you'll be shopping with the knowledge of what you need, in hand.


    Zitat von Driven

    I have a source for free, lightly used, older parts and a 128 SSD

    Then, I have to say, I really like the SSD idea. :thumbup:
    __________________________________________________


    While some users are using Laptops as servers, I'm not a real fan of USB enclosures. With the hub in the Laptop and the hub in the enclosure, it's a hub behind a hub. Adding to that, all USB chip sets are not created equal. Some the cheaper low quality USB/SATA bridges are bad news.


    Zitat von Driven

    If I can get my hands on the i5-6500 SFF box I want it has one 2.5 and two 3.5 bays

    If you can get it, this is the route I'd go. I'd install the SSD in the 2.5 bay, but I'd still boot from USB. There's something to be said about having the boot drive on the outside of the box. It's easier to clone.

    I set my system up different ways at first until I settled on what I did below and my system smokes with very little CPU overhead. Best practice is whatever works best for you :)


    SSD drives are cheap now. I bought a crucial 240 GB drive for $40. I installed OMV on it and expanded the partition with Gparted so I could run everything in a nice large partition drive.


    I have been running this 24/7 with no crashes. People will tell you that this will basically burn out the ssd, but they are so cheap I do not care.


    I purchased another ssd the same size and backed up my working system to it and set it aside for whenever it does crash. My system has been going strong for about 1 year now with no hiccups.


    I was initially having trouble with plex not playing back my videos and locking up. I found out plex was, by default, writing the transcoded files to my hard drives instead of to my ssd drive thus having i/o conflicts. I ended up making a transcode partition on the ssd drive and directed plex and omv to write to it. I think emby is the same.


    I can now play high def videos / audio with no issue. I even have one other person stream through the net off my system with no issues while I simultaneously stream through wifi at home.


    I also had plex write it's database to my hard drives because it will eat up the ssd drive space if you have lots of media.


    128gb ssd will be fine. I am only using about 40gb that includes omv, docker programs, and space for transcoding. This will increase during download activities.


    Be aware that if you use one big drive for everything and download to it, remember to delete orphaned files leftover in your download folder from various programs that may have not automatically deleted or moved these orphaned files.


    Good luck.

    That's a perfect senario where an SSD scratch works out nicely. I will remember that when setting up emby. Same with the metadata. Thank you

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