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?
While this is a great approach for any business hosting mission critical or user facing ressources, it is WAY overkill for a basic selfhosted setup involving family and friends.
For this to make sense, you need to have access to 3 different physical locations with their own ISPs or rent 3 different VPS.
Assuming one would use only 1 data drive + an equal parity drive, now we’re talking about 6 drives with the total usable capacity of one. If one decides to use fewer drives and link your nodes to one or two data drives (remotely), I/O and latency becomes an issue and you effectively introduced more points of failure than before.
Not even talking about the massive increase in initial and running costs as well as administrive headaches, this isn’t worth it for basically anyone.