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?
  • @tburkholEnglish
    17•1 month ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 month ago

      I got a server from ewaste because the RAID card did fail and having SAS drives they couldn’t even pull data from it with anything else. It was the domain controller and NAS so as you can imagine, very disruptive to the business. As they should they had an offsite backup of the system and so we just restored onto a gaming PC as a temporary solution until we moved them to M365 instead.

      I just use software RAID on it now and so far so good for about 180 days.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 month ago

        It was the domain controller

        Bruh are you telling me they only had a single DC?

        You need a minimum of two.

        Also putting general storage on a DC is a really bad idea. The VM or machine running ADDS should run exclusively ADDS (and required services like DNS)

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 month ago

          This all happened two weeks before I started, so I don’t know the exact details. If it was set up the way I think it was, I’d say yes, the DC was in it’s own VM and then a separate VM would’ve been used as a NAS. Of course being hardware RAID the whole host server went down when that card failed.

          They probably didn’t have a second DC set up due to the DEFCON 5 levels of “We can’t work!”

          They were ultimately planning on going to the cloud anyway from what I heard and that catastrophe just accelerated that plan ahead