How many hard drives should I buy ?

    Hello,


    I am replacing several systems at home with a single server under Proxmox.

    Goal is to run OMV, Home Assistant, Frigate and Jellyfin.


    I got a good deal on a Supermicro X12 + Intel 10500, so I will be able to have ECC as well.

    For the case I bought a Sagittarius case, so I have enough room for 8 HDDs.

    The OS will be installed on the SSD NVMe.


    Now the question would be how many 3.5" HDDs should I buy ?

    I would like to separate critical data from non-critical data, especially given that Frigate will record 24/7 non-critical video streams.


    I am currently running a RAID1 with BTRFS (and bcache) without any issues since years, so I am quite familiar with BTRFS (and linux).

    And yes I know the risk with RAID1 (failure during reconstruction in case I lose one drive), but for this I have my backups.

    So I was thinking about buying 3 HDDs: 2 in RAID1 configuration and 1 without any redundancy.


    Can this configuration be easily managed by OMV ?

    Or perhaps there is a better configuration for my use case ?


    Thanks !

  • crashtest

    Approved the thread.

    No redundancy personally gives me the heebie jeebies...


    Most if not all of this is going to depend on how much you want to spend and how much storage you need.

    OpenMediaVault 7 6.14.5 Plugins clamav, md, omvextrasorg running on a new NAS box a mix of new parts with recycled hardware.

    Rosewill Helium NAS ATX case, Antec Truepower 450 Power Supply, MSI 970A-G43 mainboard, AMD FX 8370 8 core processor, 32GB DDR3, 1TB SATA SSD, MSI Geforce GTX-710 graphics with PCIe x1 to x16 riser, Inspur 9207-8i SAS / SATA HBA SFF-8087 with SATA breakouts, 10GTek Intel X540-BT1 chip PCIe 10Gb NIC, 1 3 TB, 8 2 TB HDDs. (Total of 14TB RAID5 and 3TB single drive).

    Quote from dbhosttexas

    No redundancy personally gives me the heebie jeebies...

    Not me. Costs only electricity and additional costs for the hard drive. I have time-shifted backups. Raid doesn't interest me. Whether the NAS is not available for a few hours is not so important. Backups of the system are also more important.

    I will have redundancy on critical data with RAID1: that had saved me several times over the years (data corruption due to faulty cables, PSU, hard drives, etc.).

    Silent corruption of the data which can corrupt even the backups: risk not acceptable because I can lose a LOT of data (hence RAID1)

    Remaining drive fails during reconstruction: I will only lose the data since the last backup, so risk is acceptable.


    But for non critical data (video streams), I don't really care.


    So is 2 HDDs in RAID1 configuration for critical data + 1 HDD for non-critical data a good approach with OMV ?


    Thanks

    Quote from mischka

    Not me. Costs only electricity and additional costs for the hard drive. I have time-shifted backups. Raid doesn't interest me. Whether the NAS is not available for a few hours is not so important. Backups of the system are also more important.

    You do you I guess. Yes I could certainly get more available storage but would suffer from downtime should a drive fail. Mind you, RAID is no backup, it is a component to a downtime mitigation strategy.


    Backups are well worth the time and effort, but offsite backup services, especially if you have a LOT of data, can be expensive to have...

    OpenMediaVault 7 6.14.5 Plugins clamav, md, omvextrasorg running on a new NAS box a mix of new parts with recycled hardware.

    Rosewill Helium NAS ATX case, Antec Truepower 450 Power Supply, MSI 970A-G43 mainboard, AMD FX 8370 8 core processor, 32GB DDR3, 1TB SATA SSD, MSI Geforce GTX-710 graphics with PCIe x1 to x16 riser, Inspur 9207-8i SAS / SATA HBA SFF-8087 with SATA breakouts, 10GTek Intel X540-BT1 chip PCIe 10Gb NIC, 1 3 TB, 8 2 TB HDDs. (Total of 14TB RAID5 and 3TB single drive).

    This is a difficult question to answer because philosophy will vary from person to person. I prefer more than one disk for redundancy, call me paranoid. Depending on how much data I can afford to lose, I have a the first backup that syncs every 12 hours or so, then a second backup that syncs once a week. If something gets sideways I can go back in time a bit before the data got changed. Sometimes there are more backups on other machines or remote sites depending on the configuration and the need.


    With regard to the original post, I would recommend at least a 4th disk. Run an rsync task for critical folders on the RAID1 just to reduce the chance of data loss. I’ve lost two disks simultaneously before, and I vowed to wise up after that. Your machine can house 8 and disks just aren’t that expensive anymore.

    Quote from mischka

    Not me. Costs only electricity and additional costs for the hard drive. I have time-shifted backups. Raid doesn't interest me. Whether the NAS is not available for a few hours is not so important. Backups of the system are also more important.

    Unless I am wrong, is that the redundancy he was referring to?

    No less than 4 Drives RAID 10 works good for me, you have redundancy and speed, I have 8 8TB in one built system and 10-1TB in another old Dell Terra server.

    They both work great for me. Bare in mind this is a home lab setup not mission critical business use. I just mirror the systems for major have to keep stuff and the other is everything, even do a Google drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive sync once a week, as I use Dropbox on every PC for quick reference, diagnostic, info, software keys, etc.

    RAID is not power efficient, I would just use MergerFS + SnapRAID. It spins up only the disk that is being accessed and you can simply just do one sync a day to keep the parity drive(s) up to date. This should keep most drives spun down during the day.


    For the NVR recordings, it's really not necessary to have redundancy on there so you could have just one drive dedicated for that. This is where I throw old drives laying around for...for the sake of squeezing the last bit of lifespan out of them to maximize value. Depending on the recording type (eg. continuous vs motion detecting), this is probably the place where you don't want to be spinning drives up & down so from a power efficiency standpoint using 2.5" drives is actually better to keep on 24/7. Many of them idle at <1W whereas 3.5" drives are closer to 5W.

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