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?
A NAS has layers. If you RAID the 7 disks together they’ll act like 1 disk with fancy protections depending on the kind of RAID. After that you can setup volumes. I don’y have experience with OMV, but truenas and unraid do this so I assume omv does too. You can have one volume be for docker stuff, another for media, etc. Then within each volume you setup folders.
You can break up the RAID into as many logical volumes as you want. Well, there’s probably a limit, but I haven’t reached it.