I have an old x86_64 computer which I am planning to use as a NAS. Which of the 2 is a better option? Is it helpful or better to run on bare metal or as a VM on proxmox?
I verry much like OMV, simply because i could use it with knowledge i already have.
It is a Debian system -> I understand that
It uses normal RAID and ext4 -> I understand that (Plus, if things go wrong, I can just pop the drives back into any other computer and use it without much fuss)
It has a rSnapshot plug in -> I already used that in the past.
Sure I’m missing out on fancy stuff like BTRFS / ZFS, but i can live with that.
I have tried few of them but I highly recommend you to try UNRAID. It will introduce you to world of docker containers
I run UnRAID myself as well. I don’t need raw performance, just stupid amounts of storage for my data hoard, and being able to slap in whatever disk has the best $:gb whenever I need to expand has been such a nice change.
I do have a SSD pool to run my containers and separate one for drive caching as well.
Do you use SnapRaid?
Hadn’t heard of it, seems like it’s similar to Unraid, but parity has to be manually syncd whereas UnRAID syncs constantly?
Kinda, but it can accept JBOD and you can add new disks of any size whenever you want without the need to reconstruct everything (things that I think that’s necessary with UnRAID, or am I wrong?)
When adding/removing disks you do have to rebuild parity, but it’s not the end of the world and it handles it automatically. I run parity checks pretty often anyway (every other week) and it takes the same amount of time.
I just like the Unraid UI and Docker implementation tbh. I used to run everything off Portainer/Compose on my QNAP which was great, but these days I am lazy and having an Update All button is 🤌
Can you add disks of different sizes? With SnapRAID if I put a single disks in a different PC, the data is still readable, is this the same with UnRAID? Thanks for the info!
Yepp exact same as Unraid, I have 3x 18tbs one of which is Parity, and a couple old 4gbs I need to drop but am too lazy to do so 😅. Can add whatever size but the parity drive has to be at least the same size as the largest drive in the pool.