ENTRY
I learned about ServerBuilds by listening to SelfHosted and 2.5 Admins podcasts with JDM, Alex, Chris, Joe, Jim Salters, and Allen Jude.
This led me to ZFS, Sanoid and Allen’s wonderful two “ZFS Mastery” books which I devoured and constantly refer to.
Seeing the bitdeals.tech group-buy got me started as it introduced me to inexpensive used enterprise drives and LSI SAS HBA cards.
The NAS Killer series has been a gold mine of information on hardware and software options:
And the other eye opening guide was Hardware Transcoding with QuickSync:
Utilizing these tools, I built a primary Plex/NAS server based on a G5400 processor,
https://www.newegg.com/intel-pentium-gold-g5400/p/N82E16819117875
4x3TB Toshiba SAS drives set up in ZFS mirror pool (2x2x3TB) running Ubuntu in an ATX case with 8 drive bays for expandability.
https://bitdeals.tech/collections/sas-hard-drives/products/toshiba-3tb-mg03sca300
An existing Ivybridge system (also with 8drive bays) was repurposed with the same 2x2x3TB hard drive config as a backup (because raid is NOT a backup).
https://www.newegg.com/black-antec-performance-series-atx-mid-tower/p/N82E16811129242
Sanoid and Syncoid are then used to manage rolling snapshots and remote backup, respectively.
My new years resolution will be to make the backup system truly remote and relocate to my mom’s house about 30minutes away. I love wireguard and will use it to securely connect the two computers without opening ports in the firewalls.
Thanks for all the great resources and teaching me fish.