OpenMediaVault - Great NAS OS for xbmc
#1
There seem to be lots on unraid and flexraid builds here.

I tried UnRAID. I didn't really like it.. the out of the box experience was pretty poor and you needed to chuck a lot of addons at it to get it half reasonable... which irked me as they charge for it. The performance was also not great.
Furthermore the slackware base isn't the easiest for doing anything funky with it (maybe as I'm used to Ubuntu/Debian)

Haven't tried flexraid, but it looks a good option for anyone wanting to add RAID functionality to an existing WIndows build.

However, if you're going to be building a server something dedicated to the task will always work better. That's why I went with OpenMediaVault - It's written by one of the devs from FreeNAS but it debian rather than BSD based.
I have a 4 disk RAID5 (I grew it from a 3 disk setup without issues) and it works beautifully. I have installed tvheadend on mine so have PVR server functionality.

There is a nice script on the forum for installing CouchPotato etc. if that's your thing. (I tried it out of interest, but don't use newsgroups)

http://openmediavault.org/



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#2
If I have understood correctly, Open media vault relies on traditional NAS modes (EDIT: I meant RAID modes), which have one incovenience.

For example, take raid 5. If I'm not mistaken, lose one disc and it can be recovered. Lose more than one disc, and you lose ALL of your data, because it is stripped across other drivers.

In solutions as Unraid or Flexraid, lose one disc, and it can be recovered. Lose 2 discs, and you only lose the data of that 2 discs.

Of course, with serveral RAID modes you can increase the tolerance, but the problem is still the same: should tolerance + 1 drive fail, you lose all of your data, while with Flexraid, you only loose the data of those discs and the other can still be read as nothing had happened. Unraid, on the other side, only allows a 1 disc tolerance.
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#3
RAID6 would give you full two disc tolerance (you would lose NO data), and you can also configure hot spares in OMV.
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#4
Yeah, but if you lose 3 drivers, you lose ALL data... in Flexraid, you can have 2 full disc tollerance, and, if you lose 2 drives, you can still get the data of the other ones. One example: 2 discs to play "Parity" duties, and 8 discs with actual data in them, totalling 10 drivers.

In Flexraid:
If you lose 3 data discs -> you recover data from the other 5
If you lose 1 data discs and 2 parity -> you recover data from the other 7!
If you lose 2 data discs and 1 parity -> you recover data from the other 6 drives.

In traditional RAID6, data is stripped (at the block level) across different drives. This makes it faster, but as said, lose 3 drives and you are completely lost!

It has been already discussed here about which one is better (Unraid, Flexraid, RAID 5 or 6) and I think that the general opinion here is that, for media, Flexraid and Unraid are unbeatable. Why? Because when storing media (Bluray rips, TV shows with multiple seasons, lossless music) it is very easy to rapidly fill lots of drives. With Unraid/Flexraid you have a minimum protection but, if a fatal crash happens, you'll still be able to get the data out of the rest of the disks.

Of couse, I don't like that both Unraid and Flexraid must be paid for and that they rely on a very small team of people. Also, the Unraid addons are lots of them unofficial.

Anyway, I don't want to put you down. I'm glad OpenMediaVault works for you, I just wanted to add some more information, which is always good Smile
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#5
Chances of losing 3 disks at once are Huh
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#6
I agree.

Also tried Unraid and Flexraid but as many mention the advantage of the raid4-6 option the two solutions offer i don't like the realtime raid unraid offer. This with the pricey license keys of both and looking further was the way to go. Ubuntu server w/ snaphot raid is really working for me.

I tried openmediavault in the 0.1 days and thinking of trying to port it to my obsolete iomega nas....should be cool if that would work.

Omv anyway is really growing up nowadays.
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#7
I've been running OMV now for several months and I love it. Maybe it's just because I'm comfortable/familiar with Debian/Ubuntu. But there are lots of guides for getting stuff running on Debian and OMV is completely Debian-compatible... at the moment it's running SMB, SABnzbd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, Subsonic, Maraschino, Mylar and Lazy Librarian. All of them were simple to set up and manage securely.
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