Hi guys,

I am currently hosting a bunch of things on my Gigabyte brix (jellyfin, rrr-Suite, vaultwarden, pihole, openHAB, paperless, Hyperion, …)

Additionally we store all our pictures there.

Everything is stored on an attached 4TB external HDD.

Now as I start to get worried about data loss and I am missing a bit of power (to host Immich for example) I am considering updating my system to an Intel NUC or similar,

However as HDD are pretty expensive I am unsure how to proceed with the storage. My first thought was to run everything as raidz2 but I quickly noticed that storage space is super expensive and 4x18TB HDD would set me back easily 1000€. As far as I understand I can’t have a raidz and use different HDD sizes and just add HDD on the go.

Now I was thinkingto have a solution that is scalable and buy additional storage when needed, so currently my idea is to run a raidz1 with 3x8tb (or 3x6tb) for the very important data like the paperless data and our pictures and additionally just start with one 18TB standalone HDD for the media for jellyfin and add more when needed.

Does anyone have any other smart ideas how to organize this? It would be great to have some kind of data protection for the media too, but I feel in doubt this is the stuff I could afford to loose cause I can quickly redownload it.

How are you guys organizing your drives?