ArchGabriel

May I ask what is your reasoning for having 14 small drives and 5 average sized drives (average in the context in which Seagate now does 16TB)? I would imagine fewer larger drives would have been easier to manage, use less space, use less energy and you would not have needed all those expansion cards. I have seen quite a few people using your strategy, I just don't get the reason behind it.

I think you're looking at around $30 per TB* (or more with NAS grade HDDs), so yeah, it won't be cheap. * That's in UK. Hard Drives tend to be cheaper in the US.

Are you sure? I read that it now covers 10 VMs. This is from their website: "In addition to protecting 10 VMs with the level of capabilities provided in Veeam Backup & Replication Standard edition, Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition also provides FREE, UNLIMITED ad-hoc VM backups and migrations for any additional VMs you may want to protect. With no agents to deploy, as well as powerful recovery options and VeeamZIP™, you get flexibility in options and a reliable, FREE VM backup solution for your daily workload management. " I'm not really sure what the difference is between the 10 VMs and the other "unlimited" backups.

I see. That is really a good strategy. For turning the backup on, you could use WoL or even IPMI if your motherboard supports it.

Oh, yes, I see. No, it is the hard drives that would cost me much more than the actual system. That's why I am not building it yet.

Oh, yes, that is 3 years, not 2 on the IronWolf. My mistake. So you are saying that your main server backups up to your backup server. What about your other devices? Do they back up to the main server and then to the backup one or just to the backup one? That is interesting. I was always worried about losing my VMs. But I can see your path is better by just keeping the VMs simple and then you can reconfigure easily. Interesting approach on the backups. It pretty much sounds like you are doing a GFS rotation backup scheme. What software are you using for that? For your 100GB of personal data, how much space do you end up using with your hourly+weekly backups? For your full system failure, you could just use a fireproof box/safe or something similar. Alternatively, you could look to store the drives at a nearby storage space (self storage/storage rooms, whatever they are called). Here you could rent an entire square meter (10 sq feet) for about $20 per month. It is expensive, but less headache maybe than driving to your friend's house.

I am looking at various options for redundancy for a future server build I have in mind and I am wondering what would be the best option for parity-based redundancy on an array of hard drives. For simplicity and lower cost, I will consider just single parity for now. The options I am looking at are hardware RAID 5, ZFS' RAID-Z1 and Windows Storage Spaces ReFS Single Parity Pool. As far as I've managed to understand, RAID-Z1 would tend to work better than RAID 5 in terms of speed and solves some of the issue associated. Besides that, I would not need a RAID card for it. However, I was not able to find much detail on how RaidZ1 compares with ReFS Single Parity Pool.

No, it is not just a backup device. It's my main server, so it has various other services runing on it as well as a couple of VMs. I have a Seagate Surveillance 4TB, Seagate IronWolf 6TB and Seagate Exos 10TB. From now on, I will buy just Exos 10TB for simplicity. They are not noisy as all. You cannot hear the server at all unless you're literally sitting with your ears next to it in which case you can only hear the fans. Obviously, besides the 20TB for storage, I have some SSDs for OS, virtual machines, Plex Transcoding etc.

Also, here is proof from the Seagate registration portal.

Yes, I've registered them on the Seagate Website. Shows 5 years and the seller lists 5 years as well. This is the one I've got: https://www.ebuyer.com/743943-seagate-enterprise-capacity-10tb-3-5-hard-drive-512e-sata-at-ebuyer-com-st10000nm0016

Yes, I considered tiered storage, but I'm not sure that would help with media files and backups (those are the largest files on my server). My personal files (under 200GB) are simply being kept on NVMe SSDs (on my PC) and SATA SSDs (on my server) so they are not an issue in term of speed.

They do come with warranty. IronWolf is 2 years, IronWolf Pro is 5 years and Exos is 5 years. Exos is basically the best and it is at the same price as IronWolf whilst the IronWolf Pro is usually bout $60 more expensive. Also, some Exos drives come with hard drive encryption (they have something simillar to a TPM module in them). You can also get Exos SAS, but I don't have SAS support so I went to the usual SATA ones (however, there is virtually no price difference between them).

Thanks for the advice. I know RAID is not technically a backup, but for the purposes of a media library where files might get changed once or twice per week, there is not a lot of difference, in real terms, between RAID, backup or file-sync-ing. I have decided to go with a software called Bvckup 2 for file-syncing my media library and my backup media library every 24 hours. Yes, I am paranoid about backing up personal data (including work, study, projects etc) as well. I am actually just as "worse" as you as I back it up on 3 different places as well: on two separate hard drive on my server and on OneDrive. I would also recommend you get OneDrive for you files. I'm paying something around $5-7 per month for 1TB of OneDrive which is ridiculously cheap. Amazon is much more expensive (I think double the price per TB for their cheapest option). Might I also suggest on taking a look on this other post of mine from earlier today about overall backuk strategies? Same for you, I would love to hear your opinions on my backup strategy on my other post. I don't have a RAID configuration for redundancy as it would create inherent inneficiencies. I use a combination of back-ups and file-syncing. In regards to an outside server, yes, that is a great idea and I do have a location available. As long as I'm prepared to spend the money on building a small server with enough storage to deploy there, I will take this approach.

I am curious what hard drives and SSDs are people using on their home servers/NAS/video surveillance storage and generally for large home data storage. I am also wondering what redundancy techniques and software are people using on those servers/NAS/etc and on their personal devices that they are backing up to their home server. I know this topic is quite wide-ranging, but I felt it would not have made a lot of sense if I broke it in two or three different posts. Server Storage Devices Personally, I've started with some Seagate IronWolf 6TB hard drives and then jumped on Seagate Exos 10TB hard drives. I also have some SATA SSDs (Samsung 860) in the server that I have set in RAID 0 (through software) which I am using them to store and run my virtual machines from them. Server Redundancy Technique (RAID, FileSync-ing, Backups etc) Most of the data I have on the server is personal data, backups and media. I do not have surveillance footage on the server at this time, but I might have it in the future and I would to hear about how people who have that are dealing with it. For personal data (including projects, work, study etc), I keep it on my main laptop, on OneDrive (some 1TB available there and extremely cheap), on the server (syncs from OneDrive) and as backups (also on the same server, but on another drive than the OneDrive folder). For the backups themselves, I don't use any kind of protection (if they're gone, then they're gone, I'll just make new ones) but I do run additional backup plans that store backups locally on my other computers and laptops. So for a system backup, I would have a comprehensive backup plan that backs up the system multiple times per week and then keeps several chains of incremental backups that go back a couple of months and stores those backups on the server. At the same time, I would have a secondary backup plan for the same data that runs only once per week and only keeps one chain of incremental backups going back 4 weeks and stores those backups on the individual device (on a drive other than the system drive being backed up, naturally). For my media library, I wanted initially to go with a RAID 1 approach or some other hardware or software real-time disk mirroring approach, but I ended up using a file syncronisation/folder mirroring software called Bvckup 2. I use it to sync my media library and its backup (located on separate hard drives) every 24 hours (though the software can be used for real-time synchronisation as well). What I love about this software, besides the fact that it does delta copying and that it is very user friendly, is that I was able to set it up so that each time a file gets deleted from the main library, rather than being simply deleted from the backup library as well, the file gets marked for deletion and is moved into an archive where it automatically gets deleted 2 days later (it can be set for any period) unless restored. So new files get backed up no later than 24 hours (or immediately if I were to use real-time sync) and deleted files remain accessible for up to 3 days (2 days minimum plus the period between deleting the file and the daily sync task). Software for Backup of Server and Personal Devices In regards to back-up software, I am using Acronis True Image for my computers, Acronis Backup for my server and virtual machines (I know it's a bad choice, I wanted to use Veeam for my VMs, but it does not support VMWare Workstation, only Esxi) and, for my Android phone I am using a combination of OneDrive for my photos, OneSync for other small files (e.g. configuration files etc) I want on OneDrive (the OneDrive app does not allow automatic upload of files from my phone, except for photos and videos, so that's why I need OneSync) and Resilio Sync (basically Bvckup 2 but peer-to-peer based rather than local/LAN limited) for other backups (though mostly I use Resilio Sync for sync-ing movies between my Server and my phone because I don't want to pay for a Plex subscription for the "priviledge" of downloading files from my own server). What advice would others offer me on how to improve this set-up and what storage hardware and redundancy techniques and software are you using for your servers/NAS?

I had external HDDs and cheap HDDs previously and they worked well for many years. Then they suddenly died last year (two of them within a day of each other) and I lost all my media library at the time, despite having it backed up. I'm not doing that again. Also, re-downloading all the movies and TV series was a huge headache, especially as some are more difficult to find (especially the older ones or the ones from non-English speaking countries) and some took ages to download. For some TV series, I had to go and buy the DVDs from Amazon to recover them (and then rip them), so that was both a huge headache and an additional cost. Fortunately, I don't have a data cap, but you are right about the rest.