Before you scream at your screen, I am aware this setup isn’t ideal, to say the least, my Self-hosting has been composed of a laptop with a usb carry with a 2.5 1tb hard drive. I recent made up my mind about getting a couple 4 tb server hdd (heard barracuda are relatively silent) to run software raid 1, since I can’t find a budget double bay carry (that I can purchase locally) I’ve decided I’ll get a couple 3.5 inch usb cases and get a splitter to run the power from just just one brick.
My question is regarding resiliency, I get occasional blackouts and low tension every now and then, a few times a year but it can be a few times in a day. I’ve never had hardware dying because of it and I don’t have a UPS, but I worry I could be risking data corruption or something swapping to this setup because of the extra power those drives will need being fed from the wall instead of the laptop (the laptop feeds the current drive over usb alone and it has a battery) which could be abruptly cut off every now and then. Right now, the worst this has caused has been having to reboot the system because it got unmounted but never had a loss of data from this.
Am I worrying for nothing? Would it be just the same? Should I just put this off until (if) I can afford the drives plus a ups? So far I’ve had my server for basically free, but I’m running out of space for family photos and I kinda have to upgrade.
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the thoughtful responses! What I’ve learnt from them so far:
- ZFS (what’s used for software RAID) takes some extra memory and might not be the best idea for a memory constrained system.
- In this case of mirrored drives, it’s better to schedule backups than to try a flimsy raid array usb abomination, didn’t even think of that as an option
- Sudden power loss is likely to corrupt files
- Following the previous item, a UPS is more important than I thought, my laptop’s battery probably saved me from more corruption than I was aware of. I might have to prioritize that over the expansion.
Learned a lot so far, thank you all so much!
USB enclosures tend to be less reliable compared to SATA in general but I think that is just FUD. It’s not like that’s particularly bad for software RAID compared to running with the enclosure without any RAID.
The main argument for not doing that is I believe mechanical: Having more moving parts mean things might, well, move, unseating cables and leading to janky connections and possibly resulting failure.
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Source: 10+ years of ZFS and mdadm RAID on USB-SATA adapters of varying dodginess in harsh environments. Of course errors happen (99% it’s either a jiggly cable, buggy firmware/driver, or your normal drive failure) but nothing close to what you speak of.
Your hardware is not going to become damaged from doing software RAID over USB.
That aside, the whole project of buying new 4TB HDDs for a laptop today just seems misguided. I know times are tight but JFC why not get either SSDs or bigger drives instead, or if nothing else at least a proper enclosure.