Hello everyone, I have caught the server bug. Have been having a lot of fun researching and building. This thread I am going to keep as my overall server project log. Below is my unraid server project with the list of the things I would like to do. I am looking for recommendations. I will keep this up to date as I move along. The plan is to build two servers one at my house and one at my parents’ house. This will cover the 3-2-1 rule.
M.2 860 Evo 1Tb (Meta Data Installs and Windows 10 Gaming VM)
2x WD Helium 12Tb (Parity Drive)
2x WD Helium 12Tb (Storage Drives)(Add more as needed)
Server #2
2x WD Helium 12Tb (Parity Drive)
2x WD Helium 12Tb (Storage Drives)(Add more as needed)
B450 2200G
Kingston HyperX Predator 8 GB
1x Gigabit Port
Build Log 1. Plex Server Install
Backup for all my movies and TV shows. No guides install was pretty straight forward.
2. Setup Windows 10 Gaming VM
Used app “Unassigned Devices” to pass through my M.2 860 Evo 1Tb. Used GParted to split the drive in half. The second 500gb section will be used for app installs in the future. (Plex & Nextcloud)
Current Issue: I can’t pass through my USB 3.0 controller to the windows VM. I get these error messages on startup:
Jan 18 12:20:53 Ministereth kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.6: AER: Uncorrected (Non-Fatal) error received: 0000:00:1c.6
Jan 18 12:20:53 Ministereth kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.6: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Uncorrected (Non-Fatal), type=Transaction Layer, (Requester ID)
Jan 18 12:20:53 Ministereth kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.6: device [8086:a296] error status/mask=00100000/00010000
To Do List
Add Scrubbing feature to plex
Look up Anti-Beacon for windows install
Subsonic vs. Madsonic vs. Ampache vs. Plex vs. Emby for audio library
Personal VPN to my house. I travel a lot and Netflix does not work in some countries. VPN - Wireguard. https://forum.level1techs.com/t/self-hosted-vpn-with-wireguard/160861
Backup android phones to the server every time I am on wifi – Nextcloud App
Collabora Online - Built-in CODE Server
Setup a recycle bin for drives
Encrypt Nextcould Files
Schedule backup of 1Tb M.2 Drive
Host a shared folder like Google drive but without uncle google reading everything – Nextcloud
Current Questions:
How do I ensure file integrity between two servers? Aka if a file gets corrupted on Server #1 how do I ensure that the corrupted file doesn’t overwrite the good file on Server #2
I am learning but how to I do my best to keep the data safe?
How do I encrypt the data stored through nextcloud
The first step is to use a checksumming file system with multiple disks, so ZFS, BTRFS are the major options. Then, it depends on if you want to use one server as primarily a backup, or if people also read/write files to it.
Plex, Jellyfin, Emby are all competitors. Or, you could use VLC or Kodi on the local machine, and access the files on the remote server via a network share.
Pretty easy on the server end, you will presumably already have network share(s) already setup. The thing is more which backup program on the Android end, just get one that can save over SMB.
Nextcloud is overall better then Owncloud, although the Ownclould sync client(which is optional) is better than the Nextcloud client. They do come from the same code base, so they are very similar. One of these is the best choice IMO if you want a google drive replacement.
You may want to look into getting a separate wifi access point (or two, depending on how big your house is). That way it can be upgraded/replaced separately from other networking components.
+1 for NextCloud. Also has a plugin for TrueNAS if you go down that route.
How do you plan to use these ports? If you are looking at LAG / LACP you need compatible managed switch. It may be easier just to go 10GbE using SFP+ for similar price.
No. One drive redundancy of 12TiB is asking for trouble. Either stick with a mirrored pair and backup separately or look at 6 drive minimum for 2 disk redundancy with RAIDZ2 (buy smaller drives to match pricing). Ideally grow your array in mirrored pairs (VDEVs) until you get to the capacity you want. You can use the barracudas in the array if you want.
I ended up going with 4x12Tb drives per server total 2 Parity and 2 Data. If I need more storage then I will just add more dives to the data side. I have a technical question (noob question) does RAIDZ2 work like Unraid Parity drives (if I had 2)?
Unraid Parity – Situation I have 8 drives and 2 of these are parity drives. If 1 of the six data drives dies then I could rebuild off the 2 parity drives. If both parity drives die then I loose that one drive worth of data?
Short answer is no but the net outcomes are the same.
Zfs uses a distributed parity model, so the parity checksums and other features of zfs are applied to every disk and crucially the data is spread across all the drives. If you lose any drive the data is rebuilt from all the other drives,which have copies of your data.
unraids parity model works differently in that it has a dedicated disk for parity checksums and data is held only on a per drive basis.
The benefit of the unraid model is it is easy to expand the pool, as you just add more drives and the software just starts writing parity bits to your dedicated parity drives.
The downside is it is just a parity check, not a data integrity check. What zfs does is much more advanced and can handle a degree of data corruption on a drive without a full rebuild.
Each has a use case and for home use with less than 6 drives, unraid is fine. If you start looking at multiple shelves of drives, zfs is a better route.
Comparing unraid to ZFS is kind of unfair. You can run ZFS on unraid if you want. The reasons one chooses to run unraid are in a completely different category of logic from choosing a filesystem.
That said I see ZFS and Unraid’s md+shenanigans as apples and oranges. They are for different things in my mind. I use both in my setup for different reasons entirely.
This is really getting off into the weeds though so I’ll leave it at that.
Thats how it works yes.
Going with your original 4 x 12 setup in a raidz2 (I’d recommend against this if you dont do backups), if you lose 3 disks in the array then whatever is on the surviving disk in the array is gone.