Comment on How bad of an idea is it to use computing HDDs in a DIY NAS?
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 3 days agoI know it is a bad time but I planned to stick with my normal external consumer harddrive for another year at least. Should I wait and just hook up an external USB drive to my RPi and use it as a samba share for backups?
I checked for used enterprise drives but I didn’t find anything with SATA for a reasonable price yet, unfortunately.
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Consumer is fine then, cheapest you can.
You can def wait, but do the over-under with what you can pay. External drives, even if shucked, seem to be the lowest quality drives and die earliest. May be better to get real drives now, even with inflated costs.
Make sure you get a drive for backup. Extra layout up front but worth it. I’d recc 1 data drive + 1 backup drive over just 2 raid1 data drives any day.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Yes I will definitely get a CMR drive, I read enough comments warning me about SMR lol
Yeah I should probably get a little bit extra money in hand but buy something good instead of some garbage.
Would you consider that better even if the backup drive is in the same house as the data drive, just powered off?
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Backup drive doesn’t need to be anything more than holding your (ideally daily) backup of your main drive(s). It doesn’t need to be powered up and spinning all the time, it can be in the same computer. Spinning up and down causes major wear on hard drives, but I think spinning up once a day for backups is fine and won’t stress it.
For example, have 3 used enterprise drives in my computer case: 2 in BTRFS RAID1 (mirror) as a data drive and 1 with BTRFS as a backup drive. I use snapshotting to mirror the data drive to the backup drive. I then use restic to copy essential data from the backup drive to a remote cloud location (friend’s house with a 4th smaller hard drive - if I did not have a friend with a hard drive I would use hetzner most likely). My Linux ISO’s don’t go remote, but my photos do.
Thus I have immediate redundancy (and bit rot protection) from the BTRFS RAID1 data drives, I have a local full backup with the BTRFS backup drive, and I have my essential stuff far away if the computer explodes or something.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Thanks a lot, again! I think I will focus on active and backup drive (+remote for the few essentials) and only use RAID if it is easy (and cheap) to implement.
Do you have any tips how to implement the powering on and off automatically? And would it be possible to have both in the same case or is it necessary to separate them physically?