Hello all,
WARNING, This will sound very jank to some of you heavy hitters, so keep in mind this isn't polished, it's mostly a way for me to learn more and hopefully save some e-waste, please bare with me. I have been trying to research all the different methods out there for pooling drives and mirroring them and best-practices etc and am having a hard time picking which lane to really dive deep on and go for. I would really appreciate some expert advice on if this is a bad idea altogether or assuming it's viable, which direction I should head to learn more on and further flush out. Thanks in advance!
SITUATION:
- I do repairs and upgrades and often end up with unwanted drives anywhere from 128GB to 4TB (but mostly in the 512G-2TB range). Once in a while someone will want one of the 2-4TB ones, but mostly people don't want used drives (and I don't recommend it either)... So they end up e-waste, which seems such a shame
- I still have a old mostly-retired media server with 8 sata ports (and bays) that I am thinking of repurposing for homebrew Nas/starter homelab to let me tinker and put these to at least some use
- I don't have a real NEED for huge capacity or 4x redundancy etc,. This would be NON-critical use. My first thoughts are some entry-level home lab tinkering, maybe a steam-cache, or maybe a NAS for non-critical but occasional convivence use. Some tinkering fun and hopefully use, rather than waste. Any added suggestions are welcome.
NEEDS / WISHES:
- Absolute 'Needs' are few because I'm noobish to this and I'll keep it non-critical for now
- Definitely still want some redundancy since they are different degrees of used and more likely to fail than average. Even though I'll keep it non-critical I'd like some buffer against the hassle of just loosing chunks of it
- If the solution involves Proxmox or similar OS that would be friendly toward other tinkering on VMs or docker type things, I certainly would not object to that
- The easier/faster adding or replacing drives is, the better!
Rotation of drives will be higher than most people's because A) the different degrees of used are more likely to fail than new B) I don't have 8 saved up atm, so at least at first will be growing the number of drives up to 8. C) Once I max out the sata ports I'll still probably want to replace the smallest or slowest as a better one comes in. Eg. when I get another 1-2TB one I'll probably be happy to pull out the smallest current dirve (say a 250G) and give the new one it's slot. Not talking weekly here or anything, but (especially at first) might replace a smaller one with a bigger every month or two
- I'm very good with hardware, pretty good with software, but am inexperienced with backup... So doesn't need to be ELI5 simple (and if you tell me X system is a little more complicated, but well worth it, then I'm happy to read more and learn it)... but learner-friendliness wouldn't hurt since a 2nd copy of a select few files on an external drive is all I've ever really needed up to now. BUT with your help, I'm TRYING to get better haha! For fun and tinkering sake at least, and hopefully some practicality down the road ;-)
MY FIRST INSTINCTS: (but feel free to redirect me)
1.) SEMI-MANUAL?:
Seems like anything that automates redundancy of arrays/pools really wants all drives to be the same size. I have found a few things that kinda work around this, but they seem sloppy and not very friendly to even semi-frequent upgrading/replacing of the drives. If I missed a good way, please let me know. But I'm thinking maybe my best bet is to just JBOD the smaller disks into one or two more convenient and usable larger size and keep 2-3 of the largest drives as individuals and just manually backup the JBOD to them for redundancy. Not as elegant or automated as I'd like, but might be the best way to use the smaller ones until all 8 slots are filled with only 1TB+ drives. Thoughts?
2.) DUAL POOL/ARRAY?
If keeping the drives all the same size makes life so much easier that it is all that should be considered, then can that (reasonably) be done in 2 pools? Meaning exclude the outliers from the plan, like sell or save for later the occasional 4tb, and deem that reusing is good in concept, but that anything under 500 isn't worth it. Then could I build one RAID array of 500GB and another of 1TB drives pretty cleanly and effectively? Or does even two get messy fast? Then would probably sort of leap-frog and once I had a few 2TBs, let the 500s go and still keep the array of 1TBs but dismantle the 500s array and build a new 2TB one. Better or Worse idea?
3.) WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU SUGGEST?: Is there's a better whole different direction to head?
That got longer than I meant it too, but was trying to avoid folks needing 6 more followup quesitons before they even could start trying to help me. So thanks for reading through it all. And double-thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction from here! Cheers!
