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!
Hmm, you might be right, but if you’re talking about piracy then no, it’s ok if I don’t have much space for it. I know the piracy community is awesome and I don’t have anything against who decides to pirate, but it’s just not for me, thanks for the warning nevertheless!
About the ZFS waste: yes, it’s definitely a waste, but I’m going to store there critical data I don’t want to lose (mainly pictures and documents). I can’t spend too much right now because I’m still a student and 4 bay systems cost at least 200 more for the same specs, while a more open, custom build has other implications that would be more difficult to control (noise, space, power consumption, heat). I know I’m kind of locking myself in this system, though, but I really think 4TB will be enough, my calculation is this: all the pics+vids I have are <40GB rn. All important files I store are <60GB. That totals 100 GB. Let’s say I collect that many GBs every year (strong assumption): I won’t fill 4 TB in 10 years. If my GF wants to use Immich, maybe she’ll store more pictures, but I doubt it will be more than 100GB/years. But let’s be pessimistic: she uploads 200GB/year. Then it would still take more than 10 years for me & my gf to fill 4TB.
And in case I desperately need more space I can always use both drives and have more backups in the cloud. Or I can buy a DAS and connect it to the ugreen.
Really appreciate your input anyway, it’s precious to me :) Let me know if you think I’m making mistakes !!
If you’re storing “critical data”, you want to look at redundancy (ie backup) and not expecting a single store to not have issues. Drives will fail, and if they fail in a RAID the entire store is at risk until the array is restored. If you don’t have hot spares it’s at even more risk while it’s rebuilding. ZFS is less sensitive to this than traditional RAID, but even it can’t magically restore data from thin air.
The typical recommendation for backup is 3-2-1 or a variation: 3 backups on 2 types of media (local/remote/cloud suffices) at least 1 off-site..
The link above discusses the 3-2-1-1-0 which I think is good to understand as 0 refers to verified backups. Unverified backups are no backups at all. It’s not unusual in the SMB space to do a test restore of a percentage of files monthly (Enterprise has entire teams and automation around testing).