I set up Jellyfin on my main machine as a test. I enjoy the experience and want to migrate to a NAS, for better reachability in my network. I am a beginner when it comes to networks.

I currently use a single 20TB HDD (current usage 80%) and another 4TB HDD is around somewhere. I was wondering what my options and recommended solutions are. Should I get 1, 2, or more 20TB drives? I want some redundancy, but don't want to invest into too many drives.

Looking forward to any tips or resources to read up on. Thanks.

top 11 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

At least get one more and set up a raid1 so each drive contains a copy of the data.

The downside is this limits your expandability as converting between raid levels is not easy and you don't get any additional space.

If you get 2 more drives you could go for a zfs1 or raid5 to get the extra space and a drive in case of a failure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

On a synology NAS you can use SHR-1 raid (which is basically raid 5) with just two disks. In pratice that acts like raid 1, but you can just add more drives and it will act like raid 5.

Not sure if other NAS have similar custom raids.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

With 20 TB drives, I would have concerns about a drive failure during a rebuild. I suggest at least 3 drives and a config that can handle 2 failures.

Unless everything is replaceable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Spot on.

Plan a little for growth, maybe a 5 drive unit with 12TB drives, with duplicate parity.

Optionally: Two 20 TB drives mirrored, cloud backup (e.g. Storj. io or another), perhaps another local 20TB drive that's a backup or a local replica.

Edit: any approach needs to include off-site backup, and that backup needs to be tested, at least quarterly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I would at least add two additional 20TB drives and put them into a raid 5. That gives you around 40TB of usuable space and you can have one disk failure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I use zraid1 (kinda like raid5 but much better) in zfs with a stack of 18TB drives

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Look into Mergerfs+Snapraid. I’ve recently started using this setup for my media drives and it works great. Mergerfs allows you to treat any mixture of drives as one giant pool, while snapraid allows you to define parity drives for that pool. However snapraid requires each parity drive to be as big as your largest data drive. But this is a flexible and economical setup if you already have disks

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Unraid. Mix and match drive sizes. Its magic

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

But you only get the storage capacity of the smallest drive, right? So in a 5 drive RAID, if one drive is 1TB and the rest are 5TB, it's 1TBx5

It's been a while since I setup UnRAID, not sure if I remember right.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Kinda depends The parity has to be larger than your largest drive. but you can have it move data around between fast and slow drives as it is used. It can do pretty cool stuff with a few clicks. It amazes me every day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion. I will take a look.