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!

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    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).