Advice for home server

chaddesch · February 10

Hello all. Feeling kind of stupid here and could use some advice. I just built a computer using some parts I got from a very generous friend of mine and some stuff I found inexpensively and had lying around.

13400f

Msi z690-a ddr4 wifi

an old gtx 1650

a couple of decent, new seasonic 6tb drives for parity/redundancy (these I purchased new)

500gb m.2 nvme for boot

I know some of this is overkill

The purpose of the build was to setup an on-prem cloud server for my family - mainly for our photos and videos, though I suppose docs and stuff may be nice to have on there too. I plan on running our Plex server off of the 6tb drives as well. The HDDs are the same so I had planned on running them mirrored - either RAID 1 or just using storage spaces to set up a pool. I’ve read that some people seem to prefer just running off of one drive and using whatever software to create a backup on the second. Not sure why that would be preferable. I can run windows or Linux. I don’t really care at this point. Z690 supports raid so I could use that or something else. I could go to the hassle of setting up nextcloud or something else. Mostly, I’m just not sure what would be best at this point. I’m not too concerned about performance and speed. This is not going to be a daily driver, though I would like to use it to play media on occasion so I don’t want it to be headless. My main concern is redundancy/file preservation and ease of use. My wife will not bother using any of this if I can’t fully automate it for her and make it as easy to use as possible. I also want to be able to pretty seamlessly replace or upgrade drives as needed without data loss. Whatever solution can have an upfront cost but no subscription cost. Thanks in advance for your recommendations and suggestions. Cheers

Electronics Wizardy · February 10

I'd probably get truenas, use the software raid, and then its easy to install nextcloud.

If you want simple and hassle free cloud options are still typically better though.

unijab · February 10

I run a jellyfin with two 18TB drives in a zfs mirror on fedora server.

if you have three drives... (depending how much media you have now)

you could mirror two of them and backup to the 3rd one.

Bdavis · February 11

TrueNAS and unraid are the best two options. Personally I prefer trueNAS. Lawrence systems on YouTube has many videos on setting up trueNAS to get you started.