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Gradually buying HDDs for home server: best strategy? (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello guys, I just got a motherboard, a CPU and a 8 bay case (Node 804) as a deal and was thinking to getting other components to make a home server.

It would be unrealistic for me to buy all 8 HDDs at once, I can't afford to do it. Also, I guess I should also take into account the HDDs for a backup device, and a spare HDD to keep around when needed.

So the question: what's the best way to start gradually? If x is the total capacity of the main device, how much should it be for the backup device?

Just for the record: I already have a 6TB WD RED HDD hanging around, connected to an Odroid HC2.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

My personal strategy was to buy reman’d HGST drives off Amazon and take the acronym “RAID” literally.

I think it was ~$30 for a 4tb drive (there are other sizes, i just picked one that worked for me) and I filled my nas with them and dedicated two drives to redundancy. I set them all to raid 5 and then put an extra drive in the last bay and configured it to be a “hot swap” - essentially raid 5 means one drive can die on me and the data is recoverable. Then the nas will automatically pull the hot swap online and begin the recovery process immediately if one does die cuz if two go there can be data loss. Your could even raid 1 the drives and then if one dies the other is fine.

I got lucky and haven’t had any fail yet but if you’re willing to put up with and plan for a possible drive failure you can get some seriously low $/TB.

Depends on what’s worth it to you, but i like my redundant array of inexpensive drives.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Other users have commented good suggestions already, I went down the ZFS (freeNAS), then OMV, and have finally settled on UnRaid, I just have a mix of drives and keep adding, the only caveat is if you want a parity disk it needs to be at least as big as the largest drive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Https://shucks.top to track prices of Western digital drive prices. Start with 3. ZFS equivalent of raid 5