this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
23 points (96.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39980 readers
780 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Basically title. Is it common to use some kind of RAID for backing up other RAIDs or do people just go with single drives?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Could always use UNRAID for the backup if you're trying to be storage efficient, but it's really no better than RAID5

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Obligatory "TrueNAS is free " comment

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Unraid’s “killer feature” is the ability to mix and match disparate drive sizes and only requiring the parity drive to be at least as large as your largest data disk, a la MergeFS/Snapraid. Also ZFS chugging RAM like there’s no tomorrow so not really an option for underpowered devices like some NASes. But yeah, TrueNAS is nice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Thats is a very budget-friendly choice for UnRAID to accept varying drive sizes. As a backup destination, especially a cold backup, the RAM requirements of ZFS should be less impactful. I had lots of use from my TrueNAS box with 16GB, and my dedicated cold backup build is just 8GB on 5x1TB WD Blue (gasp!) HDDs. I always wanted to try other NAS platforms, but I'm away from all my tech for a few years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Lol.

If you have a spare box doing little, and a bunch of drives, it (or unRAID) are reasonable solutions. Proxmox can also build RAID with random drive sizes - I'm running one with 3 drives, using ZFS RAID 0, it has a terabyte of storage.

Yep, it's gonna suck when one of those drives fail.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Well as long as you're aware of the risk and prepared for it, its not so bad to run in a volatile way like that. I ran my TN box for almost a decade on the same USB boot before I finally caved and picked up three Intel enterprise SSD for the job, with one as a cold spare. Nothing in the vox was critical or would be missed for more than a few beers of crying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yep, all RAID has the same kinds of issues - largely sensitivity to X number of drive failures. Which is part of why we see RAID 6 (double parity), Mirroring, RAID 1-0, etc, all as mechanisms to provide compensation for disk failure within the RAID.

In the SMB, RAID 10 seems to be the favorite approach today for NAS/Virtualization hosts (ESX, etc), with backup going to a cloud provider such as iland or barracuda.