Thank you for your insights and suggestions. Very glad I didn’t buy anything yet. There appear to be a number of PCIe options for using both SATA or NVMe, but I’ve decided to get a couple of smaller, cheap 2.5 SATA SSDs just for the OS.
The plan is to just have Proxmox installed RAID1 on the two SSDs for redundancy, then the real data array is 4x12tb HGST in some ZFS configuration. Does this seem sane?
What is more expensive for your organization: time or money? In general, your options that cost less take more time to setup, and vice versa.
It seems like cheap is more important, so I would roughly do:
This is my story, too. I’ll have a few if I go out to a bar, but I’m done doing that shit all the time; having to go outside when I’m home, in my car, sneaking out at family gatherings, etc.
However, if I were to return to hanging out at bars a lot, I would absolutely become a full time smoker again.
It seems to shortcut implementations that require more than one block, and mimicks parameters from other functions.
One of the first things I noticed when I asked ChatGPT to write some terraform for me a year ago was that it uses modules that don’t exist.
I’d recommend just scripting with rsync commands and run with cron or whatever scheduling automation. Backup locally to an external drive or orchestrate with cloud provider cli tools for something like S3.
There are some tools that probably assist with this, but it’s just very few moving parts to roll your own. Clonezilla seems overkill and harder to automate, but I will admit I’m not an expert with it.
I have Arch on a 2013 mbp and it has served very well for years. I think I had to do a little work getting the backlight controls bound to some hotkey combos, but that might depend more on DE than distro. I’m probably going to put NixOS on it, since I’m not using it as my work laptop anymore. Use whatever you want! Debian is always a pleasure, too, in my experience.
Thanks for your time and consideration. I planned a few different builds with an N100, but everything priced out way more than I wanted to spend, even without drives. I saw this server for $80 on FB marketplace, and that was that.
RAID1 is only for the Proxmox installation, them I will use ZFS for the block storage.