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?
Well, it’s IT, so the answer is always a big ol’ fat, “It depends!”
Ostensibly, the primary reason for RAID is in the name: redundancy. Of course, there’s RAID 0, which is for performance, but that’s kind of a different thing that doesn’t seem to apply here. The main risks it mitigates are those associated with drive failures.
RAID isn’t, and should’t be considered, a substitute for backups. But, backups can be a substitute for RAID in some situations. If you simply want to avoid losing data, the right backups solution can do that for you, but your time to recovery will be longer; rebuilding a RAID disk from parity is much faster than restoring a backup from scratch.
So, if you want, you can RAID some disks, partition space on those disks and store your important data on the RAIDed partition. The rest can live on backed up but un-RAIDed disks. It’s really according to your specifically desired recovery time and risk appetite for that data.