Hi all,
I want to build my own NAS system. (Surprise!)
Sorry for the long text and bad English. TLDR: See questions below
Situation:
I have lots of internal and external data discs and now I want to concentrate all data in one place. The problem is that I do have my important data backed up, but the most part is not because of cost reasons, laziness and because the data can be "restored". e.g. it's not nice if you loose a VM, but you can always rebuild it.
Requirements:
I need a RAID system, that's flexible in size. I have to be able to grow and/or shrink it.
The price is also very important. That's the reason why I want to migrate my data (see below) and why I don't have ECC planned. The space should be approx 10 TB.
My use case:
First of all I want to have one big place where all my data is and I don't want to bother with disc boundaries.
Secondary I would like to use my NAS as ownCloud device and backup place for my family. I'm not sure yet, how I will make it accessible over the Internet. I think the best solution is a VPN, if it works with smart phones.
Why OMV:
I use Linux (Ubuntu) since some time now and extremely pleased with the mixture of GUI and a powerful shell, which you can, but don't have to use. I expect a similar thing from OMV: The basic and main functions are accessible from the GUI and the special functions and tool can be accessed by SSH.
My Plan:
I have 2x 3TB and 2x 2TB and want tool buy additional 2x 3TB. My plan is to free the first 3 TB drive and build a RAID 5 with the first 3x 3TB and put the data on it. Then I free the next 3TB device and grow the RAID 5 to 4x 3TB. Then copy the data of the drive to the RAID. For the 2x 2TB I 'm not sure what to do. Either I create a RAID 0 and add it to the raid 5 (asymmetrical) or I create a RAID 1 and create a LVM of both raids (1 TB less).
Hardware:
I compiled a list of hardware which I want to buy. I think its a good compromise between expandability, performance per watt (idle), sata-ports and price. I want to use the USB stick as system drive and run the plug-in to reduce the writes. In the long term I want to run a RAID 5 of 3TB WD Reds.
Link to the whole List or list as Spoiler:
2 x Western Digital WD Red 3TB, 3.5", SATA 6Gb/s (WD30EFRX)
1 x Intel Celeron G1840, 2x 2.80GHz, boxed (BX80646G1840)
1 x Crucial DIMM 8GB, DDR3-1600, CL11 (CT102464BA160B)
2 x InLine 76696B, PCIe x1
1 x ASRock H97 Anniversary (90-MXGWC0-A0UAYZ)
1 x NZXT Source 220
1 x SanDisk Extreme 32GB, USB 3.0 (SDCZ80-032G-X46)
1 x be quiet! Pure Power L8 350W ATX 2.4 (BN221)
Software
OMV, the newest stable release (V 2.x at the moment)
omv-usbbackup (To do backups of my important data)
omv-flashmemory (For the OS stick)
ovm-lvm (For "connecting" the two RAIDs)
omv-fail2ban (For additional safety)
omv-openvpn (For connecting to VPN)
omv-openvpnas (For supplying a VPN)
omv-owncloud (For my own cloud )
omv-omvextrasorg (For all the nice plugins)
omv-wol (For waking other PCs)
omv-virtualbox (For running other OSes)
Data-Structure:
I will try to build this data structure:
Questions
Q - Hardware:
1. Will it work with the Hardware listed above?
Q - Data structure:
2. Can I do my "grow RAID, Copy Data, Grow RAID, ..."-plan or will it fail? This should also be possible in the future if I want to add drives.
3. Is there a FS which is easy and pretty safely resizeable, in case I want to grow/shrink the RAIDs? ext4?
4. I want to create one big FS (ext4) and add there subfolders which will be shared in my network (e.g. Pictures, VMs, Owncloud, Backups, ...) so they grow dynamically in size. Is this possible? As far as I understand this works with FS, but does it also with folders in the FS (to have the flexibility)? Is this the shared folder point?
5. I started OMV as a VM and built a RAID of several small virtual HDDs (see screenshot).
But now I can't add the Raid 1 to the Raid 5. Is this a bug or a normal behavior? I guess it's normal and you can't add a RAID to a RAID. Afterwards I wanted to try LVM, but all the dropdown menus don't work (or have no content). Do you have an idea how to 'connect' these two RAIDs?
Q - Plugins:
6. Which protocol should I use if I want to share data between Windows and Linux PCs, but also Android devices?
7. I tried NFS and SMB, but in both cases I can see the services in my network, but I get either " Connection refused" (Network) or "Connection refused" (SMB) on my Ubuntu PC. But as far as I know I set both up to allow everything. Do I have to forward any port out of my VM?
Regards,
Fhnx