I needed somewhere to plant files while I reconfigured my ZFS NAS from raidz1 to raidz2 and added an extra drive to compensate for the loss of space. Suprisingly I got away with it!

Mergerfs is quite useful. Now I have a lot of occasional spare storage and somewhere to put snapshots until I can save up for a proper backup drive.

I’ve tried Snapraid but we didn’t get on, I never got the hang of it and lost data as a result.

I think you can use different size disks with ZFS if you use raid10 for the pairs, but the cost would be to high for me. Did I read somewhere that they were working on a way to use different size disks? That would be useful.

Just to add, I’d like BTRFS to be brilliant, so much interesting potential, but I read its deemed safer to use raid10 rather that any variant of raid5. if you’re ever faced with having to rebuild the array, as others have mentioned. Single use is ok as far as I know.

I built a franken-server from some bits awhile ago using old disks of different sizes.

The disks were formatted individually with BTRFS (Mostly any FS would do) and then a mergerfs pool setup across all the drives. I got full use of all my old drives. Sizes varied between 1TB and 6TB, gave me 20Tb of usable space.

Mergerfs has no redundancy and no parity although it is designed to work with snapraid.

If a drive is lost only the data on that drive is lost, you just need to replace that one drive, the data on the other drives remains intact. The loss of a drive in a Raid0 or JBOD array, results in the loss of the whole array and all the data.

Some sort of backup is probarbly appropriate.

https://trapexit.github.io/mergerfs/latest/

Might be worth a look.

Thinkpad T420, i5-2520M, 8Gb RAM, 2 x 1TB SATA SSD, 1 x mSATA and a mmc card. Some usb storage plugged in for good measure.

It was bought 2nd hand for children to use, then workshop laptop, eventually retired as occasional NAS space running OMV 8 (Debian Trixie).

I expect it to just work forever.

KDE on Manjaro - The Wayland update caused issues with programs that I used and had depended on for years. I struggled to find suitable replacements or workarounds for the features I was comfortable with on X11.

I experienced random lockups and sound issues, displayport would reset now and again. I worked with these issues until I got fed up and reverted to X11 in the login screen after installing plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11. Everything works as it used to, for now.

This experience made me want to look for alternatives to KDE, I’m not ready for Wayland.

Incidentally, does Wayland have an alternative to X2GO apart from RDP?

🤣 🤣 🤣

Mint is solid, if you use it and it works for you why change? Do you need to bother with windows? What do you use that can’t be done on Linux I wonder? Perhaps work out how to set a VM and try out Debian and even windows in a test sandbox so you’re comfortable with the processes before taking the plunge. Check out KVM, QEMU, and Virt-Manager.

You can run your Pi’s from an sata SSD, I’ve never used SD successfully long term. The lid. Maybe you could tell OS not to shut down when you close the lid and set it never to sleep or turn off? Used that on an old HP laptop (intel 6th gen) with broken screen, KDE, Jellyfin server. Might be worth a look Edit: in power settings…

Well done for installing Linux! Thats a big list you have there and without knowing what your hardware specs are or your budget, I’d suggest getting a hard-drive to replace the one thats failing. Maybe another one to back it up. If you don’t have a lot to back up then perhaps a usb stick will do that job for you.

Your list can be very expensive what with Ubiquiti and a NAS. Your router, whatever it is, will probably do for now and you can use up your motherboards spare SATA points for storage or even pop a harddrive into a usb hard drive enclose. Those are cheap. Life is easier if you have more than one computer to hand.

Definitely learn docker, find the code for Pi-hole and learn to set it up, thats no.6 done. Do the same for vaultwarden no.11 For convenience: All the basic stuff exists on DietPi so look that up, its a bit odd. Most of it will run on a Raspberry Pi 3.0 and up, possibly less. DietPi also runs as an operating system on PC architecture.

Debian (and most Linux Distros) will run as a server but you might find its a bit harder work to configure. You can run a VM within it.

If you intend to access your stuff from outside your router, you can run a proxy like Nginx or Caddy or Traefic, but you’ll need to register a domain. Just check with your ISP that they allow that. Alternatives are available.

Its easy’ish to just setup a VPN server using Wireguard and connect to that via a wireguard client from the outside. You could use Tailscale, Zerotier or Netbird (et al) which will give you more flexibility and security, ie for connection to your cameras, Game server, Nextcloud and Immich, and Home Assistant. This would also allow connections to vaultwarden. If you wanted you could build it yourself.

Anyway start small. Satisfy your immediate needs, make it work. Re-evaluate, can it be done better?, Next steps, implications of changes on performance, cost and future needs. Knowledge gaps?

You don’t have to decide now as there is loads of things to read and view, suck up the knowledge and enjoy.

Edit: Obv. you could just install proxmox and spin up all the bits and bobs you want as you want them.

This was too long, sorry

I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.

Just retired a broken 8th gen intel i3 laptop used for Jellyfin. Its replacement is a GMKTec G3 N100. 4 core 4 thread, single channel SDRAM, but 12th gen Intel which is capable of a wider range of encoding & transcoding. Came with 8Gb ram and 256GB Nvme. Cost Less than £100 on ebay. Jellyfin installed ontop of Debian & very pleased with it.

Currently running Truenas scale with smb shares to service local network.

Additionally VPN on router provides access to home network.

I have a few redundant Rpi’s sitting about now as I’ve consolidated and will be using more NUC/ MiniPC hardware in future. They’re just better value at the moment for me.

Not looked at HA seriously yet, but its part of the plan

I put Antix on a 2Gb 64bit HP Atom. Worked well for notes and browsing. Oddly an SSD seemed to make little difference to performance compared to the previous HDD. Old architecture I guess.

I put antiX on a 2 Gb HP 1 x core Atom a little while ago. It’s used for notetaking at meetings with LibreOffice, internet browsing through wifi. Not particularly heavy usage but it runs suprisingly well. As your hardware is a bit restricted, perhaps try that. Edit: spelling

I think I had a look at most of them except Umbrel. Bit of a mixed bag for me and none of them struck me as outstanding. On paper I fancied Runtipi but I struggled to get that up and running even with Debian 11. Liked the inbuilt proxy servers but some of the apps I tried fell over so there was that. Some of them seemed a bit of a walled garden, for instance cosmos cloud provides constellation vpn, free for now but intends to charge for it later. Having commited you might find in future that transferring your containers might be difficult because of the way that they are created to work with the specific application. I decided docker and portainer was simpler for me. On a similar journey to create NAS looked at Proxmox,Truenas Scale and OMV. I’m coming to the conclusion that they’re nice but I don’t need the level of sophistication they provide. The GUI are nice but I could build on Debian or Ubuntu for my needs, mostly containers and the odd VM.

Mate. Stick with Windows or MacOS. I don’t think Linux is for you.

I’ve seen this type of question elsewhere. Why is it an issue?

Standardisation? Corporate Linux? Just like the big boys? Big fish eat little fish.

Careful what you ask for . .