Hi! I know this is a kind of dangerous topic to ask :D And I am sorry this got so long.

I plan on building my own little home server. Currently I will mostly use it for nextcloud, maybe some other stuff, like git. I would like to be able to access nexcloud or git from outside my home (yes, i actually go outside sometimes… dont know why though). I will run docker and portainer on a pi5 (i guess its enough for one person) and I have 4x4tb disks. I currently plan on creating a software raid 10 with the disks to get 8tb of storage.

I have two types of disks, a new set of ironwolf and a used set of wd 24/7 drives. How would you arrange them? Put both from one type in raid 1 or mix both types in raid 1? I just heared about LVM. Would you recommend to put that on top of the raid? I dont know If i plan to change the storage setup, but doubt it currently. Im not shure if ZFS would be a better solution for me, but it seems unneccesserry at the moment.

I dont quite know what i should search for to find a solution about accessing the services from outside. I would like to avoid a (wireguard) vpn so i can log in on a different device without setting it up, or that i can connect to the vpn at work or uni and still be able to use my nextcloud data. So dyn dns with portforwarding seems to be the only option. But I am a little afraid to open up my home network to the outside like this, without another protection like a login. I know nextcloud has that, but im not shure if that is enough or what can be seen and accessed from the outside if i use ddns and port forwarding.

For backups I plan on using dublicati and storing the backups encrypted to either pcloud (would need to by, additional cost…) or a server at a friends or my dads house. But with the second solution I am not shure how I would create a tunnel to their server, so its secure for both of us. He has a static ip, so no ddns needed. Maybe here would be a wireguard tunnel be best? My dad does not have a static ip but would create a wirequard vpn for me with MyFritz (avm ddns service). Any thoughts on that? I would create a disk image of the completed os (the sd card…) once the services are running, so i can revert if something breaks. I guess a manual image is enough after the setup, because the docker containers reset anyways on restart, right?

Thank you so much, I am greatefull for every advice!

  • @theit8514English
    4•7 months ago

    For the disks, you may have a small issue with having multiple types of disks in a single RAID10, as those disks might have slightly different physical attributes. ZFS is an option here as you can add two vdevs for the different drive types and add them to the same zpool, which effectively creates the RAID10 you’re looking for. You would typically not use LVM on top of ZFS but if you go with RAID10 it would let you create logical partitions that can be expanded easily at a later time.

    Another ZFS option is to use RAIDZ1 with the 4 disks in a vdev. The vdev will use 1 disk of space across all disks to maintain a parity with the other disks. You will have 12TB of usable storage on your 16TB raw storage. This will allow you to lose one drive with no data loss.