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!

  • ShimitarAEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    I run a setup very similar for many years. Upgraded progressively from 2x120GB to 4x4Tb, from mechanicals to sdds.

    I can say don’t cheap out on the usb enclosures, the more you pay the better it is. I purchased a 4 bay JBOD usb3 box with a fan (150€+ nowadays) and that is the only enclosure that really worked out and still works (but retired) today. All single disk enclosures will fail sooner or later depending on how cheap they are, just take that onto consideration.

    The setup itself is pretty good and stable, I would suggest standard Linux MDRaid 1, and on top of that something simple like ext4. I wouldn’t put anything that adds to the disk workloads like zfs, but maybe I am wrong.

    Speed wise, I was able to stream movies without any hiccups, and that’s plenty I think.

    Do not cheap out on the enclosures. Cheap ones will last 1 month, I don’t kid you.

    And keep them cool… Fan… Air circulation… USB controllers will be killed faster than mechanical disks by heat. And 24/7 will generate heat… Those enclosures are not built for that…

    Again, it’s pretty doable and I did it for almost 2 decades. DONT BE CHEAP ON ENCLOSURES (did I say so already?) And you should be fine.