Homelab/Storage Setup (M900 Thinkcenter)

Hey All,

I am looking to reconfigure my homelab and hoping for some guidance. I have a M900 with 8GB of RAM. I use it to run several containers (Unifi, Jellyfish, Nextcloud, monitoring, etc) and everything is running fine, but I want to have the best layout for storage to have it also be a NAS. Currently, I have a 500GB SATA M.2 and 500GB SSD that is partitioned and in an LVM raid for my containers and photos plus a single HDD via USB for other media. I have now a 4 disk USB 3.0 hub that I will populate with some 1 or 2 TB disks for extra storage. I run everything via CLI on Debian. Nothing fancy…

I am familiar with LVM and MD raid and I have little knowledge of ZFS. I was thinking of mirroring the m.2 and ssd with several partitions for logs, Container storage and the OS, then run the hard disks in MD or LVM raid, but I am not sure how else I could configure this for maximum performance. Do I have enough overhead for ZFS and to use a disk for caching? Is that worth it even?

What do you guys and gals think for an optimal setup?

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Sounds like an interesting project.

I’d suggest starting here. 8GB is not very much ram and if you want to go ZFS it will thank you. Note 8GB will run fine but more is better.

I suspect you will get a lot of different opinions but at the end of the day there is no one right answer. It will be a compromise of cost Vs resilience Vs speed. Based on your infrastructure here is my suggestion:

If you want long term resilient storage I would avoid relying on the usb hub and move the drives into some kind multibay usb DAS enclosure

For good resilience you want to run at least mirrors for the drives (ie Raid1). For anything more complex you need more drives and with the m900 you will struggle.

You could put the OS on a small USB pen drive and save both disks for pure data. There is no real need for partitions, you can just use them for all the various tasks provided they aren’t also running the OS or swap.

As above for zfs you may want more ram but it will run just fine without. Not sure what you mean by caching? Read cache / write cache aren’t really that useful in a consumer setup (ie single user) and besides if your containers are already on ssds then you won’t get any speedup.

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Thanks for the response. I figured ZFS would want more RAM, which I might be able to get as we have to throw out some devices from work. I thought about clustering some Thinkcenters, but I don’t really need more compute. Storage is the issue unless I did some sort of Fluster or Ceph configuration from clustered devices.

I picked up this https://www.amazon.de/Sabrent-Festplattengehäuse-Festplatte-Docking-Station/dp/B0711L68MS/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=hard+drive+bay&qid=1601539301&sr=8-4 because I couldn’t find much in terms of USB enclosures and I’m trying to accomplish this on a budget with free hardware.

I think I’ll then stick to LVM raid and not worry about ZFS unless I can scrap together more RAM.