Hello, I managed to get my hands on a second hand Proliant HPE server that I want to turn into a media server for myself (possibly family too).

I also have a bunch of drivers lying around in all different sizes. I want a good balance of security, backup and flexibility for the future. So hear my plan out:

  • Running Ubuntu server LTS on SAS 600gb disks (now it’s in raid5 array with 3 identical disks but I probably want to change that and take out some disks from it for my data)
  • hardware raid 0 on the various single disks (with HPE smart array)
  • mergerfs and snapraid for a “raid” and backup (I read some information about it and I think for my use is the best option)
  • Headscale VPN (basically Foss tailscale implementation) for remote connection and mesh network
  • Docker with all apps

I’m no expert on servers or RAIDs or HPE. What do you think? I’m mostly worried about the hardware raid 0 + Snapraid, is it doable?

  • Egonallanon@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    When you say raid 0 on the data disks do you mean just having the disks present as single disks and not putting them into arrays? As seeing raid 0 and data storage makes me very nervous.

    And yeah I’d take a disk out of your boot array and then that into a raid 1 so you can use the extra for storage/ redundancy elsewhere.

    • Egonallanon@feddit.ukEnglish
      31·
      3 days ago

      Ah gotcha. See if if your raid controller can be flashed/switched to IT mode(HP might call it something else) as then you won’t have to deal with the raid controller’s raid settings and doing anything weird. Then you can just rely on snapraid to manage the drives.

      • TechyTochy@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
        21·
        3 days ago

        Okay after a some search looks like I have 3 options:

        • stick to my original plan but consider multiple points of failure (controller and Raid 0 on single disks)
        • The “IT” mode for HPE is called HBA but as far as I read it just creates a bunch of RAID 0 single drives (lol). I also need to update bios firmware because I don’t have this mode on my controller (huge pain in the ass)
        • Just switch from the Dynamic Smart Array RAID to legacy SATA AHCI and bypass hardware raid completely and switch off the controller. I need to reinstall ubuntu and headscale though :’(

        I think i will go with the last one.

        • 3dcadminAEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          If you go down that route then look at zfs which will allow you some redundancy (like raid) raidz1 can tolerate 1 drive dying and radz2 can tolerate 2, but obviously it is not 100% though I have never had a drive failure corrupt a zfs pool in like 10 years, and replacing a drive is easy. This question has, I’m afraid, many answers. zfs on a 3 drive system would run nicely though, and zfs is supported by Ubuntu. But of course we are talking different ways to do things, and this is part of the fun of self hosting!

          • 3dcadminAEnglish
            21·
            3 days ago

            oh and then there is truenas which will do all that you want and allows installation of things like plex and/or jellyfin automagically

    • TechyTochy@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Every disk will be in a single array raid 0 with just itself. In other words, every array is just 1 disk in raid 0 (this because HPE doesn’t have a no-raid option).