New GMKtec Mini PC NAS setup. Whats the best way to setup RAID for addtional HDDs?

Insight & Feedback
1

Hey guys, noob here.

I just got ZimaOS installed on my new GMKtec G11 mini pc hoping to use it mostly for cloud photo storage. I bought a Cenmate 4-bay 3.5” HDD enclosure with a couple 4TB WD Red HDDs to use as storage, but now I am worried I won’t be able to use RAID 1 with this setup. The enclosure is connected via USB and everything I have read online says ZimaOS doesn’t support RAID for USB attached HDDs. Is there a way to make this work? Or what other storage method should I use to make the HDDs and mini pc set up work with RAID? Thanks

2

If you are running ZimaOS 1.6 or newer, USB RAID support has improved and RAID with USB-attached drives should now be possible.

There is a good overview in the ZimaOS 1.6 video here:

That said, I would still be careful with USB RAID for important photo storage. ZimaOS may support it now, but USB enclosures can still be less reliable than internal SATA/NVMe storage because of sleep, disconnects, USB resets, or how the enclosure presents the disks.

My suggestion would be:

  1. Make sure you are on ZimaOS 1.6 or newer.
  2. Check that each WD Red drive appears as a separate disk in Storage.
  3. If they appear separately, create a RAID 1 mirror from the ZimaOS Storage page.
  4. Still keep a separate backup of the photos.

RAID 1 protects against one drive failing, but it does not protect against accidental deletion, corruption, ransomware, enclosure failure, or the mini PC itself failing.

So yes, your setup should be workable now, but I would still treat USB RAID as convenient redundancy, not a full backup strategy.

3

Great news, I will proceed with what I have then. I will keep in mind that this is not a full backup solution. Thanks for the quick response.

I do have an external 1TB drive that I have been using for backing up photos which was a pain to use. That was actually what spurred me to start looking for other options. My previous strategy for photo backup was to import my photos from my iPhone to my MacBook, then copy them over to my 1TB drive and delete from the MacBook. This was always very slow since I only did it once a year and had a lot of data to transfer. Using Immich should make this a lot more convenient. Is there an easy way I could use that drive as a backup by copying over the photo library from Immich onto it? Or what is the best way to create a backup of my storage?