I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge R730 at a killer price, and intend it to be the cornerstone of my home lab. I plan to use it as both a NAS and a container server so I can set up whatever I want with it. I’m a bit unsure of what a good setup here looks like, so I’m hoping for a bit of guidance.
As my R730 has 16 drive bays, I intend for 10 of those to be high capacity HDDs for the NAS with the remaining spots for SSDs for the containers. The R730 will also have a PERC H730 RAID controller. I want a full featured NAS solution (although I am open to more lightweight solutions) so my go to thought is TrueNAS. My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it, but I am unsure if this is the best method. Does anyone have any insight on how well this works or if there’s a cleaner solution?
Addendum: Anyone have any recommendations for RAID setups? I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I’d like to be able to add these without much hassle, but I’m unsure what to go with. It seems that ZFS can handle it well alone, but I don’t want to have gotten the good raid controller for nothing so I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup. And if I’m using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here? Based on my research, it sounds like I’ll need a lot more drives for a proper RAID setup and it’ll be less flexible, but I would like some second opinions.
I would strongly suggest not using 900GB 10kRPM drives (and especially not 10 of them) in [current year] when brand-new 8TB hard drives cost $120, and 14+TB recertified drives aren’t much more than that. The power costs of 7 more drives than you need for the capacity definitely add up over several years of runtime.
I’m a college student and I already dropped a lot on the server. I haven’t gone too deep into my planning for upgrades yet aside from the H730, more RAM when I can afford it, and more drives. I’ll take the 8TB drives into consideration though, I’d just have to build that up a lot slower but it’d give me a lot of space. 10x8TB would be fun to have
You don’t need 8 drives when they are 8 times larger than your current ones. I went from planning for 5+ drives to just downsizing to two drives in mirror. Then I can expand with another mirror.
Unless you need uptime and want to guarantee an SLA for your own services, you are much better off with a mirror or raidz1. Do regular backups (off-site, incremental) and don’t fear the disk failure.