I have never had a NAS and never used any kind of RAID. I am still going trough various how-to's, so I apologize if I ask something that may have been discussed before. I have about 19tb data at the moment, without any backup. As backup is not an option, I would like to make my data more secure using NAS storage system. At some moment I have been thinking about a pricey option of a server, large quantities of ECC ram, zfs file system with multiple zpools, ... ; but there are some characteristics of ZFS that I did not like when I learned about them. Then I compared the usual suspects (unRaid, Freenas, Nas4Free, Amahi, OpenFiler, ... , bare Linux OS) and OMV was the one that I liked most.
I have some hardware that holds the data now in form of NTFS drives in Win7, that I intend to use for the build: MB Gigabyte B85M D2V, 4GB RAM, Intel G3220. Other elements I consider are Antec 902 V3 case with Silverstone CFP-52B bay devices for 12 drives, a RAID card and an 80Plus PSU. I have been thinking about redundancy and RAID 5/6 does not do it for me. I have now the situation that when I lose a drive, I lose only the data from that drive and I want to keep that commodity so RAID 1 (or perhaps RAID 10) is the only option that I can consider. I have some RAID oriented questions, but I'll ask them in the appropriate section. The idea is to build the rig step by step, buy two drives create a mirror, transfer data from stand alone disk to the mirror, recycle old disk, and all the way around until I finish it all. At the end there should be about 48-56TB on 10-14 WD Red drives, exact number will depend on price difference between 4tb and 6tb drives in three to six moths. I have created a virtual machine of OMV with a few virtual drives and added them as a mirrored array, installed a few plugins, created some share folders, an user, created shares in windows and everything looks nice at the moment. I want to make a real demo machine next and try with a few real devices. I have some 320gb mobile drives that could help out for a few days.
A few quick questions, how much resource hungry is OMV with soft RAID with so many disk (processor power, memory usage; should I add 4gb more?)? What ball figure transfer speeds should I expect when using the OMV as mapped network drive in a Windows 7 PC with gigabit network?