Goal:
- 16TB mirrored on 2 drives (raid 1)
- Hardware raid?
- Immich, Jellyfin and Nextcloud. (All docker)
- N100, 8+ GB RAM
- 500gb boot drive ssd
- 4 HDD bays, start with using 2
Questions:
- Which os?
- My though was to use hardware raid, and just set that up for the 2 hdds, then boot off an ssd with Debian (very familiar, and use it for current server which has 30+ docker containers. Basically I like and am good at docker so would like to stick to Debian+docker. But if hardware raid isn’t the best option for HDDs now a days, I’ll learn the better thing)
- Which drives? Renewed or refurb are half the cost, so should I buy extra used ones, and just be ready to swap when the fail?
- Which motherboard?
- Which case?
You don’t want hardware raid. Some options you can research:
- Mdadm - Linux software raid
- ZFS - Combo raid and filesystem
- Btrfs - A filesystem that can also do raid things
Some OS options to consider:
- Debian - good if you want to learn to do everything yourself
- Truenas Scale - Comercial NAS OS. I bit of work to get started, but very stable once going.
- Unraid - Enthusiast focused NAS OS. Not as stable as Truenas, but easier to get started and a lot of community support.
There are probably other software/OS’s to consider, but those are the ones I have any experience with. I personally use ZFS on Truenas with a lot of help from this YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@lawrencesystems?si=O1Z4BuEjogjdsslF
Ditto on hardware raid. Adding a hardware controller just inserts a potentially catastrophic point of failure. With software raid and raid-likes, you can probably recover/rebuild, and it’s not like the overhead is the big burden it was back in the 90s.
- Truenas Scale - Comercial NAS OS. I bit of work to get started, but very stable once going.
- Unraid - Enthusiast focused NAS OS. Not as stable as Truenas, but easier to get started and a lot of community support.
Since OP wants to use Docker i would not recommend either. Trunas scale does not support it usefully and the implementation in Unraid is also weird. Also the main benefit of unraid is the mixing of drives, OP wants to raid.
No hardware RAID. Use zfs, if you can. Mirror the boot SSD. I would use a stripe over mirror and 4 HDDs. Two drives are not enough redundancy. Use enterprise or nearline drives, if you can. Debian is great, you can install Proxmox on top of it, but from the sound of it plain Debian would work for you.
For Debian how does the drive restore/rebuild process work?
https://wiki.debian.org/ZFS has nice docs. I would practice in nonproduction first if you’re unfamiliar with zfs.
Awesome thanks. My current system would become my test environment.
Don’t use hardware RAID, use a nice software RAID like zfs. 2 HDDS and an OS SSD would be a great use case for zfs.
Nobody’s mentioned Homarr or CasaOS but if you want an out of the box “Just works” but still open source experience they’re the best bet.
I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/
One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.
(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)
ZFS vdev expansion is a thing that will probably be added to the next ZFS release.
Ofc it is not released yet, so i would not recommend designing a system for it for the near future.
For HDDs the best way is to think of them like shoes or tires. They will eventually fail, but they also may fail prematurely. I always recommend having a spare drive ready.
Then just go with debian+docker. As raid software i would recommend ZFS, its a filesystem that does both and also integrity on file level. (and lots more)
I personally would only buy new ones. No matter the brand just the best TB/€ you can get.
For MB basically every Chipset gives you 4 SATA ports. You could consider picking one that Supports unbuffered ECC memory but that is not a must. If you want to Hardware Transcode in Jellyfin, then Intel is probably your best since the dGPU with Quicksync is pretty good and well supported, otherwise i would go AMD.
For 4 drives you can use most ATX cases have no recommendations here.
Just make sure the drives are CMR, not SMR.
Does it need to be 4 bay?
Aoostoar it is only a 2 bay though.
They have a AMD variant if you want to go down the Proxmox route with LXC or docker in a VM.
ProxMox.
But also, in case if your only data backup plan for them is raid 1 - in such cases I prefer to have only one HDD in the machine & use the other one as a backup on a separate machine, preferably in another location. I find it that the missing 12h (or whatever) of the latest data overshadows the (lower) probability of losing all the data (fire, flood, burglary, weirdly specific accidents, etc).
And ofc you can select what to backup/rsync or not.
Eg Immich, after return to operation the apps will just resync any missing pics from the last backup.
Also with two systems you don’t have to care that much about drive quality. Im now buying Exos 22+TB bcs why not. But when I needed quiet drives I bought Red Plus (not the regular Red ones, nor the Pro ones), they are even quieter than Exos, but smol.
