Not sure why this doesn’t exist. I don’t need 12TB of storage. When I had a Google account I never even crossed 15GB. 1TB should be plenty for myself and my family. I want to use NVMe since it is quieter and smaller. 2230 drives would be ideal. But I want 1 boot drive and 2 x storage drives in RAID. I guess I could potentially just have 2xNVMe and have the boot partition in RAID also? Bonus points if I can use it as a wireless router also.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      71·
      8 months ago

      I work with real servers. SD card boot media is generally a bad idea. VMware officially semi-deprecated it a while back. Unless you tune your install to redirect typical I/O to the durable drives (which is going to be a pain, having to find and reconfigure all those services), typical logging to disk and various temp files are going to wear it out pretty quickly.

      I would just use two drives and not separate the OS. That way, you also don’t have to worry about the OS drive failing and taking down the server.

      Just be careful if you reinstall. I’d suggest deleting the OS partitions first, then reinstalling to the empty space, instead of trusting the installer to do it properly.

      • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
        72·
        8 months ago

        I do like the idea of using USB drives for storage, though…

        I wholeheartedly don’t.

            • Sethayy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              8 months ago

              Though it could be cheaper to have a backup or 2, all identical bits stored on them and swap them out as(/if) they fail

            • ITGuyLevi@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              8 months ago

              I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).

              Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.

              • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                8 months ago

                So just… Waiting for failure then? ;)

                As for me, give me an HA cluster and I don’t care if I need to reinstall. I don’t need to worry about an additional point of failure (USB drive) that is almost always going to fail before any of the other hardware.

                It’s part of why absolutely nothing important ever runs on a raspberry Pi for me though, SD cards are no better.

                Now as for my favorite example of why I don’t do it in production? Someone doing a bit of minor maintenance in the rack, accidentally pressed against a box running esxi off USB (on a gen 6 HP for rough timeline), broke the drive.

                The backup? Well, it had corrupted, and wouldn’t boot.

                • ITGuyLevi@programming.devEnglish
                  2·
                  8 months ago

                  Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).

                  All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don’t like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).

                  • realbadat@programming.devEnglish
                    2·
                    8 months ago

                    Wasn’t my rack, thankfully, so it was someone else’s problem.

                    But anyway even internal you’re just leaning on when the thumb drive will fail vs an SSD and the onboard controller. So give me that SSD and HA any day of the week, but that’s my comfort level. I even do it at home with my proxmox clusters.

        • LifeBandit666@feddit.ukEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          I’m currently running 3.5 inch HDDs via usb3.0 to sata. Working ok so far (time will tell) but I do need a plug socket for every one of them

            • 486@kbin.social
              2·
              8 months ago

              Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that’s about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you’ll never have.

              Not sure how you came to that conclusion, but even in places with very cheap electricity, it does not even come close to your claimed $0.375 per month. At 25 W you would obviously consume about 18 kWh per month. Assuming $0.10/kWh you’d pay $1.80/month. In Europe you can easily pay $0.30/kWh, so you would already pay more than $5 per month or $60 per year.

                • rambos@lemm.eeEnglish
                  2·
                  8 months ago

                  While I agree 25W is not much, I pay around 1€ for 1W a year (Croatia) and I know there are countries that pay way more thn that. Still, we are talking about power that is close to SBC consumption, you cant go much lower. I think number of devices (drives etc) are more important than actual CPU idle power