Is it possible to install 2 nvme disks using RAID1 without openmedia vault?

General
1

I would like to install my pironman 5 max rpi with PI OS using 2 nvme using RAID 1 is it possible?

2

I’m not sure but maybe with MDADM, you can make search about it.

1 Like
3

I’m not entirely sure if I have understood your question correctly.
If you have installed two NVMe system drives and need to select one of them as the boot drive, you can modify the ROOT=PARTUUID=xxxxxxxx entry in the /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt file to the UUID of the target boot drive.
You can retrieve the disk UUID using the following command:
ls /dev/disk/by-id/

4

My question is related to the documentation and to the fact that it is possible to use two NVMe SSDs configured as raid1. The documentation mentions only open media vault. I would like to know if I can setup raid1 without it. It looks like MDADM does the job. I will try that. Do you know if I can boot on the raid1 disk array or if I will need to keep the micro sd for booting?

5

That was what I was looking for. Thanks

6

We would like to inform you that while we have not yet officially verified the functionality of booting from a RAID1 array using MDADM, it is theoretically possible. OpenMediaVault (OMV) is essentially an operating system with a web interface, and its underlying RAID management tool is indeed MDADM (Multiple Disk Admin). However, the process is relatively complex and has specific requirements.

We encourage you to try this configuration. For detailed implementation steps, we recommend consulting online tutorials or community guides dedicated to this topic, as they may provide more specific and tested instructions.

If this approach does not work, we suggest an alternative method:

Install Raspberry Pi OS Lite on an SD card.

Boot the system from the SD card.

Install OMV and set up the RAID1 array thereafter.

This alternative method is more straightforward and widely supported.

7

I know this is little old, but just having done this, thought maybe it might help someone:

FWIIW: I installed the mdadm raid1 on the drives, but chose to install the Pi OS on one of the drives, but outside the raid partition. Not sure if this is the best way, but it is a way.

  1. Installed and updated Pi operating system on SD card. I first chose the new Debian 13 download as that is what I run on my main system.
  2. Set boot order to SD card first, nvme second.
  3. Copy the SD card to one of the nvme drives. Remove the SD card and make sure it boots OK from that drive.
  4. Reboot from the SD card.
  5. Run gparted (can’t remember if I had to install it first). Resize the rootfs partition to something like 30GB, depending on how much stuff you are going to run. I run Apache2 with Nextcloud. Using the Pi for local cloud backups.
  6. Installed mdadm and created a mirror array on the rest of the nvme drives. Best to follow one of the how-to’s for creating an array with mdadm.
    Be aware that, because of single lane PCIe, you will not get great performance. Doubly so because of the mirror sync’ing. I get something near 375 MB/sec with hdparm.
    I actually copied 2 different SD cards to both drives, with different versions of the OS. This to troubleshoot problems with Nextcloud. That was resolved by dropping back a version on Nextcloud. I now put timeshift snapshots on the unused 30GB partition. (the only way I found to select which nvme drive to boot from was to physically swap them. I couldn’t find a grub entry, but didn’t look very hard. Anyone found a better wasy?)
8

Thank you for sharing, it is very valuable information.