So I’ve been running a home media server with the arr suite on it, but it only has about 2 tb storage. The storage has been full for a couple months now which has rendered my server useless. Now I’ve bought a used nas with 32 tb on 7 disks. I’ve been advised to set it up in RAID. I’ve learned how to do that in OMV and it’s setting that up now.
It takes a while though, so that leaves me some room to think. Why do we do this? I understand that it gives me more unified storage, but I also want to run other things on this machine. Like k8s to deploy my own applications and play around with devops stuff. Or even just regular file storage and photobackup next to the films and series. I thonk I would like to keep those things seperate though, is that still possible with RAID? Or is it better to put 5 disks in RAID and keep the other two for other stuff? I think my question is, how do you use RAID “practically”? How do you store different things on there? Do you compartmentalize the disks again, or do you just make different folders?
You typically use a RAID configuration for redundancy on a media server, so when a disk fails (it is when, not if) you don’t lose all your data. Having a mirror or a striped volume (or both with RAID 10) can also give a performance boost since your read and writes are going across multiple disks at the same time (depending on your RAID configuration).
However, I can’t think of a good reason to do hardware RAID anymore. You can get the same redundancy and have it be “safer” through setting up ZFS.
I ran OMV with ZFS with two disks as a ZFS mirror and it accomplished the same thing as a similar RAID mirror would do. I got faster read speeds (think serving media faster so higher bitrate) and if one disk dies, I can recover.
omv-extras.org has a plugin that will give you the ability to setup ZFS, as it doesn’t come with it by default unfortunately.
With RAID 10, you would consume all the drives in your configuration and use it like a bucket so to speak. If you did the same thing in ZFS, you could have a couple of mirrors and then pool them together to increase performance.
Either setup (RAID or ZFS) should accomodate k8s or other devops workflows. You could simply make another folder for these things, or in ZFS you could make a special vdev for it.
Anyways, theres lots of ways to accomplish what youre seeking. You can definitely do all those things things you asked about. I think you just have to do some research on what kind of setup works best for you and the kind of work this machine will do.
Edit: And make a backup! RAID or ZFS may help keep your data available, but you should always have a backup somewhere too for important things like photos. Cant stress it hard enough!!!