NAS noob here. I've been playing with OMV for a bit and I'm at a loss.
What is the EASIEST way to get RAID 5 or 6 style redundancy, while only spinning up one disk at a time to access files? I understand that Snapraid theoretically offers this functionality in OMV, but I don't know how to set it up or how to verify whether or not it is doing its job. Seems like snapraid needs customization in order to sync daily, and even when that is done it is not super easy to replace a failing disk because there is an OMV OS layer operating under the snapraid plug-in. If someone can write up a nice, simple guide for how to use Snapraid that would be great (i've seen the forum about SR... it's difficult to follow. I already have SR installed, but don't know how to use the dang thing to get redundancy and checksum). If I just use plain RAID 5 in the OMV interface, I end up with all the disks spinning to make a read/write 
Since I don't feel confident using Snapraid, is there another option? Maybe even something other than OMV? How can I get files across multiple drives with checksumming while only spinning one drive at a time for read operations? Is unraid the simplest way to do this, or am I just letting snapraid intimidate me? If they're basically the same difficulty, then I'll go with the open source option and make a donation. If unraid just works, then that's the route I want to go.
Whichever solution I go with will be compensated (donation for OMV/Snapraid, or purchase for commercial products). Any help making this decision would be great. The only thing I've found for sure is that FreeNAS is not well-suited to this kind of operation. Everything else is still on the table.
Thanks!