I use a mini PC (n100 processor) for my home server. I just have a 6tb HDD plugged into it. I’m wondering what the best solution is for me long term. I’ll probably have the HDD filled in about a year.
I see a lot of usb enclosures on Amazon but the idea of running like 5 disks over a single usb makes me nervous.
I also keep seeing the 4 bay qnap DAS that can do raid 5. That’s tempting too to prevent data loss.
I’d like to keep the miniPC as the center since it’s configured just how I like it.
What would you recommend for external storage?
Why does it make you nervous?
The mantra: RAID is not backup. RAID is for uptime and recovery in hardware failure scenarios. Backup is your protection against data loss, not RAID. If your entire RAID array catches fire, gets struck by lightning, gets caught in a flood- whatever, if it hits the whole thing, it’s gone.
Well, you have to answer the “why” question above. There’s no universal answer to this question. I myself on Windows, use multiple USB connected JBOD enclosures (16 disks). I use StableBit DrivePool to aggregate disks(on Linux, I’d use something like MergerFS), instead of any kind of RAID. I use a feature DrivePool has to duplicate specified folders across multiple disks for local redundancy to improve recovery time against corruption/hw failure etc to make up for not having RAID, with BackBlaze to perform backups to prevent data loss in disaster scenarios.
It works for me, and I’m fine with any differences in performance I might get- they largely just aren’t that impactful most of the time in my use-case. It might not be what you want. You have to consider what things are most important to you to determine what storage setup you want to use.