Beginner: use cases / hardware

What you describe is normal NAS usage. And OMV supports that.

However, OMV is not enough.

You need a network. It is the speed of the network that decides what media you can stream, not how powerful the NAS is. A tiny little SBC like a puny weak Raspberry Pi 4 can easily saturate a GbE cabled network with media streams. WiFi is typically much slower than cable.

And you need to learn enough about Docker to be able to use it to install a media pla

Even if your current network works fine, you may discover that you need a GbE switch or better/more wifi access points or even a wifi mesh.

You need some backup apps on your devices, and need to point them to some share on the NAS. And you need to connect your devices to the NAS.

You need to learn enough docker to be able to install Plex/Emby and/or Nextcloud. OMV will not do it for you.

You will also need to learn how to backup your data. Using two drives is a great way. Then you can use one for shared data and the other for backups.

The hardware list should work fine. But the hardware is gross overkill for your requirements. Except possibly for the drives.

For a first NAS I would recommend a used PC you get for free, or find in a closet. And then spend ALL the money you save on that on two of the very biggest and best drives you can find. Make sure not to buy SMR for the main drive. The backup drive might be OK as SMR.

I have a bunch of small cheap drives I regret buying. I only use them for cold storage offline. Today I only buy 16TB Seagate Exos drives. At least until something bigger and better comes out.

It is tempting to buy cheap drives, just big enough for what is needed just now. But then you will soon have to buy more drives. And then new hardware when you run out of SATA ports. When you calculate the cost per TB, also include the warranty. And calculate cost per TB per year in warranty. Then good drives with 5 years warranty will be cheap...

Your NAS typically doesn't have to decode and re-encode 4K content. All it has to do is send the contents of the media file over the network. And then the device decodes and scales the media.

If you have old weak devices, unable to handle 4K, then you may want to decode the 4K file and re-encode it as a low bitrate 720p stream or something.

So if you want to stream to weak-ass devices with small screens over slow wifi, you need a NAS with capability to transcode 4K content to something much worse. Degrade the quality a lot. Any old PC with a cheap Nvidia video card should work fine for real time transcoding of one or two streams.

Even a puny RPi4 can re-encode 4K to 720p, only not in real-time. I use Emby and it allows me to re-encode any 4K content to some other format in advance. And when I later stream, I can choose what of the available formats I want to stream. But my tiny RPi4 also can stream 4K directly to devices that can decode 4K content, as long as the network bitrate is sufficient. I often stream moderate high bitrate 4K content from my tiny weak RPi4 over fast mesh Wi-Fi to a 2K tablet. Works fine.

If you have old hardware, that might work, just test it out to see if it is sufficient. Most likely it is. Use the money you save on bigger and better drives.

Zitat von kettcar

1) Mediastreaming, incl. 4k video (Kodi or Plex in a docker container?)

[How-To] Install Plex Media Server (PMS) container using OMV and docker-compose

or Video from TDL Installation and Setup Videos - Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced

Zitat von kettcar

2) Backupstorage for personal files from my devices

UrBackup as docker or installed on Dabian along OMV.

Zitat von kettcar

3) Filesharing between my devices (via Nextcloud?) / maybe in combination with the solution of 2)

[How-To] Nextcloud with Letsencrypt using OMV and docker-compose

or Video from TDL

Zitat von kettcar

will use them in a RAID 1

Why, much better to use the drives as individuals, one for data and the other as a backup using rsync or rsnapshot

Zitat von kettcar

On the other hand there are two versions (original drive and on the backup drive) - so no need for a "backup backup

Yes and no you could still back up the rsync drive but you could run that possibly once a week, but initially using the drives this way the second drive could be set up to run rsync or rsnapshot every other day in the early hours and set it to spin down when not in use.

I don't use RAID with OMV, so I don't know what happens if one drive fail in a software RAID1, as suggested above?

Will the filesystem still be mounted?

Zitat von Adoby

I don't use RAID with OMV, so I don't know what happens if one drive fail in a software RAID1, as suggested above

The raid should stay up as clean degraded giving you access to your data, adding a new drive will allow the raid to rebuild, a possible downside to software raid is that the drives are not hot swap unlike hardware raid. So in a soft raid if you have a potential failing drive then you have to remove it from mdadm, then add the new drive, but all of this can be done by via the GUI.

Problems usually occur when a user 'pulls' a drive from their machine, so they shutdown, remove the drive, reboot but the raid has disappeared from the GUI, the array becomes inactive but the working drive/s are still there, it's just mdadm doesn't know what has happened.