Before you scream at your screen, I am aware this setup isn’t ideal, to say the least, my Self-hosting has been composed of a laptop with a usb carry with a 2.5 1tb hard drive. I recent made up my mind about getting a couple 4 tb server hdd (heard barracuda are relatively silent) to run software raid 1, since I can’t find a budget double bay carry (that I can purchase locally) I’ve decided I’ll get a couple 3.5 inch usb cases and get a splitter to run the power from just just one brick.
My question is regarding resiliency, I get occasional blackouts and low tension every now and then, a few times a year but it can be a few times in a day. I’ve never had hardware dying because of it and I don’t have a UPS, but I worry I could be risking data corruption or something swapping to this setup because of the extra power those drives will need being fed from the wall instead of the laptop (the laptop feeds the current drive over usb alone and it has a battery) which could be abruptly cut off every now and then. Right now, the worst this has caused has been having to reboot the system because it got unmounted but never had a loss of data from this.
Am I worrying for nothing? Would it be just the same? Should I just put this off until (if) I can afford the drives plus a ups? So far I’ve had my server for basically free, but I’m running out of space for family photos and I kinda have to upgrade.
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the thoughtful responses! What I’ve learnt from them so far:
- ZFS (what’s used for software RAID) takes some extra memory and might not be the best idea for a memory constrained system.
- In this case of mirrored drives, it’s better to schedule backups than to try a flimsy raid array usb abomination, didn’t even think of that as an option
- Sudden power loss is likely to corrupt files
- Following the previous item, a UPS is more important than I thought, my laptop’s battery probably saved me from more corruption than I was aware of. I might have to prioritize that over the expansion.
Learned a lot so far, thank you all so much!
Do you have backups? You mentioned family photos, so I hope so. If yes, have you tested them? Remember, RAID (or RAID-adjacent) is not a backup.
What filesystem are you using at the moment?
Questions aside, since you have precious photos and are using RAID, I would absolutely get a UPS. This will save you a lot of pain in the future, and you can continue to use it while you wait to upgrade. You can find them for relatively cheap on ebay, just make sure whatever you get has a new battery (frequently listed as “NEW BATT” or similar). Bonus points for a USB connection to gracefully shut down your raid array, protecting it from getting corrupted.
For the drives themselves, even if you aren’t shucking them yet (shucking meaning taking external drives out of their cases to put into a server), I would use https://shucks.top/ to find the best deals per TB. This comes with the upside of allowing you to shuck them in the future if you get a proper enclosure or chassis, and you don’t have to buy an extra case. Interestingly, external drives (like those listed on the website above) are generally cheaper than naked drives, especially when priced per TB. If you want to avoid shucking entirely, you can pick up DC rated drives for relatively good prices on https://serverpartdeals.com/
The three main concerns with this setup, in my opinion, are power, heat, and speed. With raid, you’ll want the UPS as discussed, which covers the power issue. Since they’ll be in cases, it’s definitely possible they’ll heat up quickly, especially if you ever have to do a data rebuild or otherwise hammer them with lots of writes. As long as you’re able to keep them below 55-60C during those operations, you should be fine, but it’s something you’ll want to keep an eye on. Speed, meanwhile, won’t impact too much but you’ll probably notice some slow writes compared to having a drive over SATA. Rebuilds will be pretty slow.
Apologies if that was kind of rambling. I’ve been a
data hoarderarchivist for over a decade. I’ve gone through several iterations of NAS and learned some hard lessons along the way. I encourage you to keep thinking about how to best secure your data from loss; it’s good to ask questions like this.Thanks, I have my important files manually backed up every now and then on two different drives in my desktop, this idea is part of moving away from stressing so much and I’m probably going to abandon the raid idea for the near future and instead do scheduled backups (and maybe checkups?). I’ll keep in mind all that stuff about temps too when I do get an oportunity to make a suitable raid array build (without individual usb controllers between the drives and the server).
I have checked my data recently, haven’t found any issues. I appreciate all the info and help!
This. So much this. OP please listen to and understand this.
Even with full mirroring in RAID 1, it’s not a backup. Using the second drive as an independent backup would be so much better than RAID.