Looking to upgrade my storage to possibly my first ever NAS. I have some questions.
Hi, I'll try to keep it short here but I'm a bit lost on what I should do. The 2TB M.2 SSD I have in my desktop is practically full and for safety reasons I want to look into RAID and ZFS and all that, but I'm not sure if I even need a NAS or if just buying like two 4TB HDDs (one as a usually disconnected backup copy) and directly connecting them to my desktop is gonna be better for me.
Let's say that my budget for all this is roughly 600 USD (converting from my local currency), though if I really have to I can surpass it a bit.
I've been using Linux (Arch BTW) for almost 1.5 years now as my daily driver so I'm quite comfortable with the terminal if I have to use it (although I'd preferably use something at least slightly simpler for ease of use and less things going wrong due to human error; this should be a very stable system that "must" work always, so KISS please), and because of economical reasons I'm willing to buy most of this stuff used or repurpose some old laptop I already have. And yes, I want this to be a DIY project not only because it's probably cheaper but because I also want to have some fun tinkering with hardware, which I don't get to do often.
My main usage for this larger storage (most of these I'm already doing on my aforementioned SSD):
•Storing my personal internet archival project for YouTube videos. I already have over 350GB and it's only going to grow faster. If I end up with a NAS then I'd also like to run yt-dlp and friends on it directly instead of my desktop (so that I can download stuff in the background while I do something else on my daily desktop or sleep).
•Storing backups of a bunch of different things, like my iPhone photos/videos or some password files or other important files to me I'd not want to lose.
•Storing photos/videos from my camera, which includes astrophotography (i.e. hundreds of RAW photos sequentially taken quite often)
My goals with this storage:
•I want to offload all (most) media files from my desktop SSD so that I can use it as fast temporary storage for some possible future personal programming projects or for astrophotography software that often requires hundreds of GB of free temporary buffer storage for processing photos.
•A more resilient and safe storage solution for archiving and preserving media (especially those YouTube archives). Right now if my SSD were to suddenly die, then I would essentially just permanently lose ~1.5 years of my personal life, plus all of those precious archives (because I have zero backup anywhere). I know RAID doesn't fully solve this, but I hope I'll be at least slightly more resistant to such a catastrophe in the future (either near or distant).
•It should be (relatively) simple. I don't care about all that homelab stuff I constantly read about (like "docker", "containers", virtualization, and all of that other lingo I barely understand), basically all I need is just a bigger and safer storage solution that I can easily access either from my local home network or directly via USB or something... and nothing more. I don't care about remote access, that's just a security breach waiting to happen - the less features, the smaller the attack surface and less things can go wrong. I also don't need encryption as this is supposed to be an archive that's easily retrievable if I literally die or something.
And finally, over time I've gathered some questions regarding all this:
- What OS? I've heard XigmaNAS is pretty good. Maybe something else? It should be relatively simple to use/setup and support RAID and ZFS, or something related.
How to have automatic file corruption error correction in ZFS?(This question seems to be answerable without human help)- Used or brand-new HDDs? (Note that these should ideally last quite a while)
- Internal or external HDDs? Are internal (more expensive?) HDDs any better for long-term storage?
- Best practices to make the HDDs last for as long as possible? Anti-vibration pads? Active cooling with some fan? Is it okay if I turn the HDDs on/off every day or few days, or will they wear out more slowly if I keep them on 24/7 (like in standby mode)? Should they be laid flat or vertically?
- What to do when (not "if") an HDD dies at some point (partially or completely)?
- Is it just enough if I get a used mini PC, connect the HDDs, and simply connect the PC to the local network via ethernet somehow? Is that really it? Or is there something more complex to it? Can I (preferably) directly connect my desktop to the NAS (like via USB or something) without the network involved, for security reasons?
- 3-2-1 rule. Is it worth it for my intended use case? Is it even achievable within budget?
- How to set up safe and automatic shutdown when mains power goes down and the UPS turns on? (This question also probably can be answered without asking Reddit, but I'm still asking just in case there's something I should know)
- Recommendations for how to run
yt-dlp(or really any custom user program/script) on the NAS directly, while actually controlling what it's doing from my main desktop? Something less powerful than OpenSSH (for security ofc, and I also never used it in my life :) ). My plan currently is to have some python script automatically start upon boot on the NAS that constantly checks whether some empty directory on the NAS suddenly gets a file sent from my desktop with instructions on what to do (there's almost definitely a more elegant solution).
I'd greatly appreciate your help! Also, this wasn't at all short as how I said, but thanks for reading anyway!
Edit: Somehow forgot to mention that the usable/effective storage amount should be at an absolute minimum of 4TB, but really preferably 8TB or more.
Edit2: Fixed some markdown stuff