So excited to consolidate my mess of drives and get a big boost to my storage.
Since this will only be the beginning bookmark this for later :P
Lol it’s so funny you say that. I got this because I’ve been wanting to consolidate 4 different drives in my gaming pc (about 5TB total). But as soon as I saw this I thought ‘why should I get rid of perfectly good drives? I can have 17TB instead of 12’. It feels like I’ve got the seeds of a bad habit growing lol.
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Sounds like it’s time to get a NAS and make a RAID array. Btrfs, mergerfs, Synology’s SHR, TrueNAS’s multi drive size solution, and probably some other options I’m forgetting can accomplish RAID 1 across different drive sizes. Then your files are duplicated to other HDDs in case one fails. Then you can back up to Backblaze B2 to make sure you your data’s backed up off site.
You can do a mixed drive raid solution on Windows with Windows Storage Spaces and backup to Backblaze computer backup for pretty cheap.
This is the upgrade I’ve been planning going from a 2 bay to 8 bay NAS. My wallet is not very happy with me… But the homelab must grow.
I’m glad my wife doesn’t mind the 5 bay. Or the 8 bay I added to become the new main NAS and the other a backup.
… Or the 4RU case stacked with drives.
Can i also have your husband?
Not as appreciated nowadays but I still use spinning disk for bulk media storage
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Just don’t go all the way cold. Both SSDs and HDDs need to be regularly powered to retain the data stored on them over a span of years. As long as you occasionally access the storage volume, you’re good, but if you’re planning on leaving a drive untouched and unpowered for more than five years, the data might not survive even if the drive does.
For that kind of long term resilience, there’s really only tape drives and optical.
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Obviously. I’m not actually recommending tape drives or optical, but rather that you simply do not leave your drives unpowered for 5+ years straight.
Optical might actually be an option for the most important data
Asterisks asterisks, I know :D
Tape drives though…I wish they would be more common and cheap.
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It’s not necessarily the spin up that’s the problem, but the fact that a magnetised bit doesn’t last forever.
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More or less how my setup is. Ssds in the desktop and spinning disk in the nas. I’m also impressed with how massive they’ve gotten over time.
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I’m just a massive data hoarder who refuses to use streaming services.
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Also great for storing lesser played large games, to transfer to ssd when ready to play again.
I just recently went entirely HDDless in my desktop. I have a singular 10tb HDD external drive that I connect as needed, but I’m considering just moving it over to my NAS since all it does at this point is store dashcam footage.
Now tell him you need another for mirrored backups 😆
And a third one for offsite backups! 3-2-1 baby!
Photo of storage device.
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I got the 8TB version the other day since it was cheap, but it’s mostly for Jellyfin.
Filled up my drive (7.07TiB/34GiB free) already :(
Can’t download much more…
I bought a 20TB drive and unfortunately that mofo is loud AF.
Is it Seagate? I find those hella noisy. I have 16tb HDDs un my NAS, and WD are much better in terms of noise.
Really? I haven’t had good luck with WD hdds in laptops and they’re the reason I target Seagate (hdds) or Samsung (ssds). In fact, I got 12 Seagates in my SAN. But admittedly, I haven’t used anything outside of the WD blue line up. Is the reliability that much better? My SAN and it’s hdds are pushing 10 years old and both were previously in use at a data center by a total of 8 Hosts so not exactly easy work. But I’ve admittedly replaced I think 4 hard drives in the past 3 years.
I’m fairly new to self hosting, barely three years into it, so my HDDs are not as old as yours. I limit myself to red WD Pros, so I couldn’t speak bout their blue line. Red Pros are great for my use, which is mostly a Plex server, phone and pics backup, and a few self hosted services.
Noise-wise I find them more comfortable than Seagate, as I can hear my Iron wolf running in my NAS, which didnt happen with WDs. In terms of reliance, my WD is just 3 years old.
Fair enough. It’s great to see someone else getting into self hosting. For me the Seagates’ noise aren’t an issue because the fans on the SAN are so loud anyways. Also it lives in the same room as the water heater, furnace, and AC anyways.
I don’t know what NAS you have, however, I’d like to recommend a few things. My SAN is capable of running docker (Synology RS2416RP+) so setting this up was admittedly pretty easy. But look into running Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett, and Deluge. If you’re running Plex, I assume it’s for media and these programs will help you get more. Sonarr for tv shows. Radarr for movies. Jackett reads torrent sites. And finally Deluge does the downloading. Message me if you’d like some more help with it.
Thanks. Yes, I’ve looked into the Arr suite, but I have not tried it yet because English is not my native language. I’m from mexico and, even though I watch movies an series in English, my in-laws and other people with access to my NAS don’t necessarily want to watch content in English. I’m not aware about whether I can make work Arrs with Spanish content, as I guess it’d be much better integrated with content posted in 1337x, for example, where English is the main language for most media.
But I’ll look into it and will reach you, thanks.
oOoooo! Get it into a raid array!