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Btrfs

Synology DS423+ for the homelab (luggage)

SPAAAAACE!!! I like Space.

Despite all my efforts, hard drives keep filling up. Producing videos definitely does not help keeping drives from filling up and these days it's rather hard not to produce videos even accidentally. Besides that, having a single large storage unit allows making all the backups to a single place, at least once. Important data is already replicated in multiple disks and/or machines, having an additional large storage allows replacing one of those copies and thus alleviating disk pressure.

Undead Yes ─ UnRAID No

My only NAS is my PC. At least, what people would usually do with, or build a NAS for, I just do it with my PC.

Most of my disk storage space is a BTRFS RAID 1 using two 6TB WD BLACK 3.5″ HDD. This setup offers block-level redundancy which is better than the classic device-level redundancy offered by Linux Software RAID or hardware RAID. To keep BTRFS file systems healthy, it is strongly recommended to run a weekly scrub to check everything for consistency. For this, I run the script from crontab every Saturday night (it usually ends around noon the next day).

One Sunday morning, after many successful scrubs, I woke up to both disks failing, each in a different way. But this was not the end of it. And the end of this adventure, disks emerged victorious.

Keeping reading to find out how the disks came back from the dead.

Illustration by Paul Kidby: Zombie leads a small parade of undead citizens with a wooden sign that reads UNDEAD YES - UNPERSON NO

Low-effort homelab server with Ubuntu Server on Intel NUC

Need. More. Server. Need. More. POWER!!!

But only a little bit, maybe just enough to run a Minecraft server, which refuses to start on my Raspberry Pi 4 because it has only a meagre 2 GB of RAM.

I had known about Intel NUC tiny PCs for a while, and how handy they can be to have a dedicated physical PC for experimentation. There was a very real possibility that I would have to set one up as a light gaming PC in the near future, so I thought cutting my teeth on a simpler server setup would be a good way to get acquainted with this hardware platform and its Linux support.