That’s still a good usage of the hardware. Main thing is that it does the job.

I see no problem putting all the machines into a single cluster. By the way, what are you using for shared storage?

As mentioned, if a drive dies, you just need to take it out and replace with a new one and start RAID rebuild. The vendor should have a guide on this with detailed steps.

Well, on Windows, for bit rot prevention there is ReFS but the problem with it is that can go RAW for no reason. Happened to me several times. As to RSTe (Intel vROC), poor performance and also not reliable. Plus, not sure how the migration would go if you want to transfer to another system.

I think that should be possible but I would prefer the second option mentioned - Hyper-V role with a NAS OS Vm and drives passed through to it. Then collect in RAID inside a VM.

That’s a very decent setup. What are you running on it?

Hmm, I guess the most IOPs and latency cut will come from a storage protocol use. I mean, with 10GbE and iSCSI or NFS, you might not feel the benefits of NVMe. Especially in terms of latency. And as far as i know, there is no NVMe-oF support yet.

Depends on the amount of data you are writing and the DWPD of an SSD. Also, take into the account parity if you’re doing RAID: https://support.liveoptics.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000498588-Average-Daily-Writes

Very nice and clean setup. Looks great!

Well, R720 is quite old. I would look into R730/R630 options. Or ideally, use some hardware that you already have. An old laptop with Proxmox might very well be a start.

Looks like a really cool setup! Nicely done.

I would go for SSDs if I needed speed. SSDs longevity is just fine. Any drive can die when you leave it unused for a decade.

Well, I’d say that a single device can’t be both easily accessible and secure. A NAS like Synology wold be my choice for simple and convenient access and then another backup to B2 with rclone.

Both. Or HDD/SSD plus cloud like Backblaze Personal or Wasabi. The main thing here is to have several backup copies. Any drive can fail unexpectedly.

I understand it doesn’t have to be a NAS but it would be much better in my opinion. RAID enclosure over USB is…well, not the most reliable solution. I would look into some Synology options. As has quite nice DSM and it can combine drives of different size in the SHR RAID: https://kb.synology.com/en-af/DSM/tutorial/What\_is\_Synology\_Hybrid\_RAID\_SHR

I honestly don’t see a huge need for a NAS in your case. Especially, if you still have free space on the HDDs. I mean, a single HDD can cover your needs easily and I don’t see any benefits in a NAS for backups.

I don’t think it matters that much. It’s more important to have several backup copies and follow the 3-2-1 rule: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/. For backups, I would just go with a cheaper option.

I would add that flash drives are also less reliable. If you store some important data there, I would go for an SSD.

ZFS can do self-healing if you drives are in mirror or RAIDZ1/2/3. I would put those two drives in ZFS mirror. Then you would scale it by adding another two drives in mirror.

ZFS doen’t need much RAM. All that talk about 32GB RAM or 1GB per TB storage is nonsense. It will work with any amount of RAM. Primarily, ZFS needs more RAM if you’re using deduplication.

Keep several backup copies. HDD plus SSD and keep one drive in some remote place. Or SSD plus cloud like Backblaze B2. Overall, follow the 3-2-1 backup rule: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/