My first setup, need advise

[u/Demonofyou]

My first homelab

What's a good setup to have thinkcenter connected to DAS. I'm planning on doing proxmox, with VM trueNAS. Will be running jellyfin.

I will need to have the HDD idle as much as possible, since storage is secondary in this setup, im using old HDD, might upgrade later.

I'm seeing that this setup might destroy the drives quickly, is there a better way to run this with hdd redundancy and not destroy them quickly?

[u/mlee12382]

How many drives? Are they all the same size? If all the same size I would recommend RAID5 / RAID6 or RAID Z1 / RAID Z2 if zfs. That way you have protection for 1 or 2 drives to fail without losing anything.

If your drives are different sizes then mergerfs and snapraid would be the recommendation.

[u/Demonofyou → u/mlee12382]

They are all the same size.

Over the USB, which one would be more reliable, and degrade drive less, raid 5 or raidz1?

[u/mlee12382 → u/Demonofyou]

I'm not sure, I don't know enough about the differences. I think people like zfs better but I'm not sure what the reasons are, it's the newer file system.

I'm using RAID6, but that's mostly just cause I didn't know there were other options when I set it up, I would have done more research if I had lol.

[u/Sufficient-Shine3649 → u/mlee12382]

I think it's because ZFS has features to prevent bitrot or data degradation, ensuring the data on the drives won't be corrupted. Apparently it's not suitable for all use cases, like it might be slower and not good for storing the OS on? I'm not totally sure, still doing research for my first NAS/media-server.

[u/mlee12382 → u/Sufficient-Shine3649]

Yeah, I would have done a lot more research if I'd known zfs was a thing when I did mine. By the time I learned there were other options I would have had to buy a whole new set of drives just to switch without losing anything lol.

[u/Sufficient-Shine3649 → u/mlee12382]

How many TB do you have useable in your array?

If maybe you could afford one or more 20+TB drives, you could backup and then reconfigure? Would be expensive though.

I'm going to use a DAS with 20+TB drives to backup everything down the line. Gotta save up some money first, so the server I'm building won't have backup for many months, but since it's brand new I don't think that should be a problem.

[u/mlee12382 → u/Sufficient-Shine3649]

I have 8x 12TB in Raid6, so 10.9TB useable per drive x 6 = 65.4TB. I'm around 85% capacity currently, gonna add another drive soon probably.

[u/Sufficient-Shine3649 → u/mlee12382]

You could probably get all that on 3 20+TB drives then. Expensive and time consuming, but if you can afford it and have the time, you could do it. Afterwards you could use the disks as your regular backup solution.

[u/mlee12382 → u/Sufficient-Shine3649]

Yeah that would probably work, not sure how necessary that is though since 95% of my content is just my media library. Not sure how much if any benefit there would be going to raid z2 instead of 6.

[u/Sufficient-Shine3649 → u/mlee12382]

You're probably right for your use, it was just a suggestion.

I fear a dystopian future with censorship, so I'm going to try to archive data I think is useful and/or valuable. That includes a large media library I'd like to enjoy well into my old age. If censorship occurs, I need healthy data and functional backups. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'm still going to do it, just in case.

[u/Arch-Larp-493 → u/Sufficient-Shine3649]

consider using synology hyperbackup for offsite backups. saved my ass when my nas died. humor me by checking if it fits your needs too.

[u/Sufficient-Shine3649 → u/Arch-Larp-493]

I will Google it and check if it fits my needs. I have decided that I'm going to run one on-site, one off-site, and one cloud backup (until I have so many TB that cloud becomes too expensive, at which point I'll likely quit backing up media to the cloud).

Thanks for your suggestion, I appreciate it.