Raid novice questions

1st Official Post

    I have an old AMD desktop (amd A10-5700 APU with Radeon HD Graphics) that about 2-3 years ago the hdd died, I put in a 2TB WD Desktop drive, installed OMV, and have found it extremely useful at our church. We have 5 computers that mostly share files, and backup to it. I also purchased a 4TB USB drive, and back up the files from the OMV server to the USB drive. I was completely ignorant to running OMV prior to this. I realize now, I probably should have bought a NAS hdd that was a little bigger. Our 2TB disk is probably about 70% full, and all runs well. I was considering purchasing a NAS device, and moving all files over there. However, I figure as long as this old desktop runs, I will probably use it. Here is my question.


    I'm looking at purchasing a 4-8TB NAS drive and installing it, and figuring out some sort of raid system to use. Down the road, if the 2 TB drive shows signs of wear & tear, replacing it with a second 4-8TB (matching the other NAS drive). I don't need anything too crazy, and I'm very confident of my backup files on the USB drive, so I feel secure in my backups. I'm open to suggestions, and know very little to nothing about raid. There is not a lot of room or plugins in the desktop, and I don't want to modify, or purchase stuff for it. I only plan on running two NAS hdds in it. Any thoughts? Is the desktop able to run raid? Is my processor going to kick the bucket? Is it going to be a headache to set up a raid system? I'm ok with working with cli, and I can plug a hdd into the mother board. My server just sits there and runs 24/7 with light use.


    Shane


    PS - There is only one hdd in the computer, it has the OMV OS, as well as the files, but the HDD is partitioned into 4 parts. The last partition is the data files.

    Basic points here.


    A raid needs more than one drive


    Ideally all drives in a raid should be the same size, otherwise you only use the capacity of the smallest drive on all drives. (You would only use 2TB of the 4tb drive since the 2TB is the smaller one).


    If you are just looking to increase the available storage you can either run them as separate drives, or you can use mergerfs to put them in a pool so they appear as one larger 6tb volume.


    RAID is not a backup. It is about high availability and/or increasing bandwidth since the workload is shared between the drives.


    Given what you outlined, I would recommend mergerfs. with backups going to another drive that ideally is not mounted all the time, with scheduled mount just before the backup runs and then an unmount. This can be done with scheduled tasks in omv or via a custom script. If using scheduled tasks you want to make sure the unmount is delayed long enough to allow for variations in the backup time.


    You can layer snapraid on top of mergerfss to give a raid like drive failure protection. I don’t personally use either one at home, so not sure if snapraid would help since you are only talking 2 drives plus a backup drive (I have a raid 5 and a raid 1 at home), but I do use mergerfs on a system at the office that has 2 hardware raids in a pool and it appears to work well.


    Omv likes to work with full drives ideally, as does a raid, so the partition thing could be a problem too. Mergerfs may allow you to merge the data partition with another drive, but I have never tried it so I can’t confirm.

    Asrock B450M, AMD 5600G, 64GB RAM, 6 x 4TB RAID 5 array, 2 x 10TB RAID 1 array, 100GB SSD for OS, 1TB SSD for docker and VMs, 1TB external SSD for fsarchiver OS and docker data daily backups

    • Official Post

    If you're running on a 1GB network, in your scenario, RAID has next to nothing to provide to you. The bottleneck is the network so you won't benefit from RAID5's parralel I/O. Other than availability which, arguably, you don't need, RAID1 is a waste of a drive.

    Rsycn'ing your network shares to either your USB backup drive or another internal drive provides backup. Backup, as in two independent copies of your data, on two different drives (not RAID1) is far better than RAID. If Rsync is set up in accordance with -> this, in the event of the failure of your primary data drive, you'd be able to fail over to your backup.

    Quote from sak.rice

    PS - There is only one hdd in the computer, it has the OMV OS, as well as the files, but the HDD is partitioned into 4 parts. The last partition is the data files.

    In my opinion, for maintenance, this is not the best setup. You have a single point of failure in the server - the "all in one" drive. Recreating it, or attempting to restore to a copy of it would be complicated at best. (And all drives fail, eventually.)

    I believe you'd be better off to boot OMV from a Thumbdrive and set up the spinning drive as the data drive. A thumbdrive is easy to clone, for -> OS backup, and a single partition data drive is easy to replicate with Rsync.

    Quote from crashtest

    If you're running on a 1GB network, in your scenario, RAID has next to nothing to provide to you. The bottleneck is the network so you won't benefit from RAID5's parralel I/O. Other than availability which, arguably, you don't need, RAID1 is a waste of a drive.

    Rsycn'ing your network shares to either your USB backup drive or another internal drive provides backup. Backup, as in two independent copies of your data, on two different drives (not RAID1) is far better than RAID. If Rsync is set up in accordance with -> this, in the event of the failure of your primary data drive, you'd be able to fail over to your backup.

    In my opinion, for maintenance, this is not the best setup. You have a single point of failure in the server - the "all in one" drive. Recreating it, or attempting to restore to a copy of it would be complicated at best. (And all drives fail, eventually.)

    I believe you'd be better off to boot OMV from a Thumbdrive and set up the spinning drive as the data drive. A thumbdrive is easy to clone, for -> OS backup, and a single partition data drive is easy to replicate with Rsync.

    Wow, thank you! So I think it is clear, RAID doesn't seem to benefit me at all, and is completely unnecessary. Thank you for the links, and thoughts on setting up OMV on a USB drive. I do think that would be better. I will read over that info. Is it reasonably easy to clone my install (one a separate partition) to a USB drive, and maintain my current setup? Could it really be that simple?


    Thank you for all the replies, greatly appreciate the info.


    Shane

    • Official Post
    Quote from sak.rice

    Is it reasonably easy to clone my install (one a separate partition) to a USB drive, and maintain my current setup? Could it really be that simple?

    To transfer your OMV configuration to a pendrive you can use omv-regen.

    Thread
    [How to] Migrate/Restore OMV Settings to Another System with omv-regen
    UTILITY TO BACKUP AND RESTORE OMV CONFIGURATION




    omv-regen

    Copy and paste the following line into a terminal and run it as root or with sudo.
    wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xhente/omv-regen/master/omv-regen.sh | bash

    • STEP 1. Create a backup of the original system with omv-regen.
    • STEP 2. Do a fresh installation of OMV on the disk you want and connect the original data drives.
    • STEP 3. Use omv-regen to regenerate the original system configuration on the new system.

    …
    chente
    Quote from chente

    To transfer your OMV configuration to a pendrive you can use omv-regen.

    Thread
    [How to] Migrate/Restore OMV Settings to Another System with omv-regen
    UTILITY TO BACKUP AND RESTORE OMV CONFIGURATION




    omv-regen

    Copy and paste the following line into a terminal and run it as root or with sudo.
    wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xhente/omv-regen/master/omv-regen.sh | bash

    • STEP 1. Create a backup of the original system with omv-regen.
    • STEP 2. Do a fresh installation of OMV on the disk you want and connect the original data drives.
    • STEP 3. Use omv-regen to regenerate the original system configuration on the new system.

    …
    chente

    Thanks! This should be fairly simple, when I find the time, I will give this a go. That will be great to have the OS on a USB stick, and data on the HDD. I just hadn't thought of that.


    Shane

  • sak.rice

    Added the Label resolved

  • sak.rice

    Added the Label OMV 7.x
    • Official Post
    Quote from sak.rice

    That will be great to have the OS on a USB stick

    When you have made the change don't forget to install the openmediavault-flashmemory plugin. This will ensure the longevity of your pendrive. https://wiki.omv-extras.org/do…:omv7_plugins:flashmemory

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