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?
As you said, RAID gives you a single unified storage pool from independent drives.
It also gives you some fail over if using RAID 6 with dual drive redundancy and hot fail over (which any modern RAID system has).
You can then divvy up the storage however you want. Single big drive with folders and file-system permissions, or split the pool into multiple logical drives, etc.
The world is your oyster.
For my needs I have a single big drive with folders, but only a single user on the RAID box has write permissions - and that’s an account from my file server.
The file server then handles shares, permissions, user names, etc, so I have a single point of user management and file access. Which isn’t really much different than what businesses typically do: storage management is separate from user/file management.
Lots of RAID systems today support LDAP, so you could theoretically manage user access on the RAID box, but I find that cumbersome, and prefer having a file server.