Hi, I wanted to start selfhosting and I’d like to have your opinion on something that I’m struggling to decide.
I don’t plan to tinker too much with my system, I’ve been a Linux tinkerer myself some time ago but now I’d like to setup something that’s really bulletproof and then leave it running (ofc I know I’ll have to do a bit of bugfixing now and then), not replacing hardware ideally for >= 10 years.
This is why I’m planning to use TrueNAS, and that’s why I’m planning to buy a UGREEN DXP2800: has two 3,5" HDD bays (4TB should be enough for me for the next 8-10 years, so I’ll have two 4TB disks in RAID1 or mirror or whatever is recommended). Only problem I have with this machine is that it only has 1 RAM slot, and I guess 8 GB isn’t enough if I use zfs. So I’ll have to upgrade to either 16 or 32 GB. Now I did my research and from my understanding 16GB seems to be enough, but it would be such a waste having to replace the whole RAM if it turns out it isn’t enough.
For reference, I don’t plan on having more than 7-8 services running: Immich, Nextcloud+office, firefly, audiobookshelf, paperless and a maybe few more if they’re useful. I value responsiveness but it’s ok if some things take longer to process (thinking immich ML, or stuff like transcoding)
I’m very interested to know your opinion:
- is the dxp2800 a good choice?
- should I go with 16 or 32 GB RAM?
And a little extra
- how much ssd space do you recommend for high speed data? is 500gb enough?
Thank you so much!
Two 4tb disks in raid 1 is a waste of money for most selfhosters. Unless you really want to avoid downtime due to disk failure. (and even then you could get a power outage or a network failure). A second disk will protect you from disk failure but not from other forms of data loss (like you fucking up something and erasing all of your family photos).
Do you also plan to buy some cold storage medium and cloud storage or a remote backup server or something (for 3+2+1 backups)? thats way more important.
Ive got an office pc with a 9th gen intel i3 4 core, 16gb RAM, you can propably find one for 100-200 dollars. Ive installed a 4TB NVMe into it.
For nightly remote backups i have a pi with another 4TB NVMe(overkill for sure, you could use pretty much anything for this) and for cold store i have 4TB external that i plug in when i remember.
I run docker and immich, nextcloud+office, jellyfin + a bunch of smaller services. I could perhaps use a little bit a better gpu for jellyfin transcoding sometimes with certain 4k files. Otherwise no need for upgrades.
Yes, of course 321 all the way! I was thinking 3 copies: two in RAID, one in B2 or Hetzner. Also I could keep daily ZFS snapshots for 1 month in case I mess up something. I know, it’s a bit of a waste but for me it’s ok since what I waste is definitely cheaper than buying a 4 bay or making a custom build. An alternative would be using two different clouds for backups and using both HDDs for space.
Nice idea, a used pc, but I’m concerned that something could fail in <4 years if the machine is too old, used office pc those are tipically from 2015-2018, so they’re already 7 years old in the best case.
Thanks for the benchmark! I think 16 GB will be more enough for me then, I don’t plan on using jellyfin, only transcoding would be immich but again it’s ok if these task are slow.
ZFS snapshots are easy to settup. If you don’t notice that you deleted all the snapshots for a month you never will.
you still should have offsite backups for a fire, but the notion that raid isn’t backup is not really correct since for most people the situations that raid with snapshots isn’t enough protection will never occure and to the risk is acceptable. Plus raid is a lot easier to get right. For that matter if you have a backup but don’t have the password after the fire you don’t have a backup.
though if you rely on raid alone I’d want 3 disk redundancy.