Basically title. Is it common to use some kind of RAID for backing up other RAIDs or do people just go with single drives?
Obligatory "TrueNAS is free " comment
Unraid’s “killer feature” is the ability to mix and match disparate drive sizes and only requiring the parity drive to be at least as large as your largest data disk, a la MergeFS/Snapraid. Also ZFS chugging RAM like there’s no tomorrow so not really an option for underpowered devices like some NASes. But yeah, TrueNAS is nice.
Thats is a very budget-friendly choice for UnRAID to accept varying drive sizes. As a backup destination, especially a cold backup, the RAM requirements of ZFS should be less impactful. I had lots of use from my TrueNAS box with 16GB, and my dedicated cold backup build is just 8GB on 5x1TB WD Blue (gasp!) HDDs. I always wanted to try other NAS platforms, but I’m away from all my tech for a few years.
Lol.
If you have a spare box doing little, and a bunch of drives, it (or unRAID) are reasonable solutions. Proxmox can also build RAID with random drive sizes - I’m running one with 3 drives, using ZFS RAID 0, it has a terabyte of storage.
Yep, it’s gonna suck when one of those drives fail.
Well as long as you’re aware of the risk and prepared for it, its not so bad to run in a volatile way like that. I ran my TN box for almost a decade on the same USB boot before I finally caved and picked up three Intel enterprise SSD for the job, with one as a cold spare. Nothing in the vox was critical or would be missed for more than a few beers of crying.
