2 hdd 8tb - best solution raid1, zfs mirror or backup

[sz3bbyla]

Is a noob question but I do not have to much experience

I have an intel nuc apolo lake with 1 sata conector and 4 usb3.0 16gb ram
I used for around 2 yers an debian with 2hdd toshiba 8tb mounted on usb 3.0 raid 1
on hdd I have samba , (for windows ), torrent, open cloud, http and personal files

I try to run proxmox and work acceptable for a home minicomputer and I thinking to add plex on it

I want to use this 2 hdd with same destination but with proxmox. My save on hdd there already around 5.5 tb and will grow so hdd cannot add more than 7 TB on it

I would like to hear opinins from people and avantages - disavantages ...

1. raid 1 for me work well , not to much speed (around 100mb/s) but in 2 yers used don't let me down

2. zfs mirror . I tried , fast write on disk (around 150mb/s) but my memory are not ecc(I understand good for zfs), eat around 8 -9 gb of ram (can be adjusted but I am limited) and on around 80% full hdd begin problems on rw

3. use only one hdd and second with a backup software (I never used but look a little bit complicated for me)

any opinion will help me to chose rigth way for me

 

[Dunuin]

I wouldn't use ZFS with that hardware.
And raid never replaces a backup, so even when using a raid1 you should do backups. In case you don'T want to buy a third 8TB HDD for backups, I would stick with option 3.

By the way...you can also turn your existing Debian into a Proxmox VE: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_11_Bullseye

 

[jayr]

As dunuin said you shouldn't treat raid as a permanent backup.

I would use ZFS because ram is pretty cheap today and you can tune the size of your arc to use less ram if desired. I would use ZFS because you will not be victim to bit rot with it. You know like when you open an old .jpeg and only half the image loads and the other half is grey or garbled artifacts? That won't happen with ZFS. To me, that is worth the extra cost.

With ZFS, your online copy does not get corrupted and by keeping your backups recent, your files do not rot over time due to cosmic events, etc.

Don't be fooled by the ZFS ECC alarmists, ZFS on non-ECC still has magnitudes more integrity over most if not all other filesystems.

 

[Dunuin]

I agree with you that ZFS would be preferable, but not really with that existing hardware.

That apollo lake NUC should use a 10W TDP Atom APU. Got a similar Atom board from the same year here and it runs terribly with ZFS. RAM is limited to max 16GB and the CPU is too slow. Doing some heavy disk IO and the entire CPU is at 100%. And I only got 2x 200GB of storage in there. So that NUC can probably neither use enough RAM for that much disk storage, nor can it handle the ZFS computation well. Especially if you also want some free ressorces to run some VMs and so on. Some non-CoW storage would be for that weak hardware.

 

[sz3bbyla]

I try zfs mirror on this small pc with 2hdd on usb , write around 150 mb/s.
cpu no more than 20%, disk IO can arrive on 70 %

for my needs is more than enough considering I acces data true samba no more than 100mb/s
in my opinion is not recomanded to have hdd on usb but is not other solution because is only one sata port in this small pc
I used for around 2 yers pluged in 24 hours a day on usb with raid 1 and when I copy all data from hdd's to all I have in the house I don't find errors

I do not know impact of using usb to sata over hdd in year's, how safe is this metod
I have home also a raspbery cm4 8gram and I can plug one pcie1.0 to sata in but in this case is pointless to use proxmox

nucca6yh have also an m2-e conector for wifi.
I bougth one m2-e to 2 port sata but cannot test it because I do not have power supply for this hdd's and I realy don't think is working
m2-e is for wifi not sata