I’m looking at different options for getting a NAS/RAID array system that is tolerant to not just hard drive failures but also to hardware/firmware and board failures. I’ve utilized a RAID array in the past that was built into the motherboard, which resulted in the motherboard failing and me having to ebay another one to get the RAID array back up and running. Then I bought a NAS 2 bay drive that was only compatible with drives up to 1.5TB. I’ve also used external drives for backup since I’ve been burned by hardware/firmware/software issues related to RAID arrays. Are there are any PCI RAID cards, NAS boxes or software RAID or other options where the hard drives would still be readable by other RAID cards if the boards failed? Maybe a software RAID solution? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

  • @peregusEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    You seems prepared on the topic so I’ll jump in with a question: what do you think about SnapRAID? What are the advantages of birds? I’ve tried SnapRAID because it seems so malleable and easy, but (maybe for my luck of knowledge) I don’t feel safe with it because I don’t know what’s going on, when it should do scarubs and sync and when it did do them. How do you see btrfs drives for OMV in Proxmox?

    • @mholivEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Hey. I’m not an expert in SnapRAID but all of these specialized systems used one of the following under the hood

      1. Btrfs
      2. ZFS
      3. MDADM
      4. Some combination of 1,2, and 3.
      5. Some proprietary system (like drobo)

      As long as the system is widely used, send you alerts when things go wrong, and uses 1-4 it should be ok. Just don’t go proprietary and make sure you get alerts when a drive fails and you should be ok.