Running on unraid (and I have another unraid lisence)
13th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-13500
96 ddr4
5 x 8tb hard drives
1 parity
2x6tb that I use for “cold storage”
3x1TB ssd for cache
The server powers on around 15:00 and off at approximately 00:30. (Reason for this - is to preserve as much life on the drives as possible as buying new ones is not on cards as we all know).
Only used it ever from within the local network.
It has worked in such a way for the past three years.
Today I have finally managed to properly set up wireguard - very goddamn proud of myself
I run very few services, but they have become indispensable for me:
Jellyfin
immich
syncthing
audiobookshelf
But now that I have a vpn tunnel set up, I’d like to run music side of jellyfin most time, same as immich and syncthing. All 3 take up less than 3 TB, but this is the most important information that I have, and it isn’t even backed-up.
I do have a tower pc as well, but one of the goals that I have is to keep the elelctricity bill at bay.
As usual - the budget is not big, and prices are crazy…
Any ideas of what could be good options - would be greatly appreciated
It’s recommended you leave hdd drives powered on to preserve their life as cold power ups tend to be harsh on the hdds, but if you are doing it for the benefits of preserving power, it’s a trade off.
I’m guessing you are using the ssd’s for read cache? ZFS use RAM as the primary ARC, so unless you generally re-access the same files frequently it’s not really worth it. For example, if you download a 5GB file, it’s cached in your RAM. If you download it again, it pulls directly from ARC. Only when your accessed files age out of ARC will it store it to the SSD read cache.
Instead of using the ssds for read, you should apply it as writing cache instead. This will improve performance for any virtualization and application writes to the NAS.
Another alternative is to just use the 3x ssds as a raid pool & backup the data to the larger pool as needed.
Just suggestions. Nothing wrong with the way you currently have your setup.
Seems like more than enough hardware for the described needs? Not sure a new build makes sense given how screwed prices are and doesn’t seem like you’d get any incremental utility from it. Only part that seems a bit iffy is tons of data and no ecc
I think this is already overspecced for the services you run. ECC would be nice to have but might not be worth the money at the moment.
This is the big one. Instead of upgrading buy some external drives you can store in a safe place, or spend the money on cloud storage for an encrypted backup.
Spend your hw budget on a backup option! Think creatively on how to make headway on a 3-2-1 backup.
Maybe the first step is another 8TB HDD, that you operate separately from your RAID. I am thinking $20 USB enclosure that you can programmatically operate via a programmable switch (only turn on a couple of mins per day to run a backup and then shut down). This super-basic setup can provide a second copy that is (mostly) offline and thus protected from fat fingers, hw failure in RAID, and hacking.
More expensive options include separate computer hw (a NAS?), cloud storage, etc.
Think about how to operate backups unattended. What software is the right one for this job? How to restore from backup?
You didn’t mention how you combine 5x HDDs into usage block storage. Assuming (because you’re on this forum) a zfs setup, you could implement backups using “zfs send | zfs receive”. I find this to be the fastest, scalable way to perform frequent backups. Take a look into sanoid/syncoid for this.
A completely different route, not for everyone, but a fun exercise for me, could be to consider tape backups.
In 2026, HDD and SDD prices are crazy. But you can get tape drives and tape - even complete tape libraries - for the same price as a single HDD. I found this to be a fun, not completely useless, homelab rabbit hole. But, as I said, not for everyone.
