Hi Lina,
Am 02.12.2025 um 08:56 schrieb lina:
I have 100TB data, that I hope to be connected from my Debian desktop,
Any small server recommendation, most important, debian-friendly for me
to maintain.
I usually pick some B-Brand, Supermicro-based systems with an
appropriate number of disk bays for such workloads.
Even though I prefer software RAID, most of the time they will have a
hardware RAID adapter simply to support the SAS/SATA backplanes and port
multipliers without me having to understand those. Turning off the RAID
functionality has not been a problem for a long time now.
The big question then is -- what is an appropriate number of disks? For
important data, you should plan to have decent redundancy, so something
like ZFS RAIDz2 or Linux' native software RAID6 are a good foundation.
Also I'd try to reduce the risk of data loss by ensuring re-builds don't
take too long, thus not use the largest possible disk sizes. Spare
drives are very useful, so my recommendation for 100TB would be
something like
16 TB spinning drives: 7 for usable capacity plus 2 drives redundancy
plus one spare: You'd need 10 disk bays, possibly two NVMes for the base
system. You'd also have to consider some sort of backup, and that will
be an additional challenge.
You'll find many vendors offering server systems with fitting specs. An
actual vendor recommendation is always tricky, even more so if we don't
know where you actually live ;-)
If you prefer a brand name such as Dell or HPE, you'll probably have to
invest considerably more money, but I haven't looked at such offers for
quite a while.
If you want/need/prefer solid state storage, you'll probably have to
spend considerably more money, because high capacity / high density
solid-state storage can be in less common form factors than the usual
3.5 or 2.5 hard disk ones, which limits choice.
In general, I find server hardware to be reasonably well supported with
Linux systems, and in particular if highest performance and GPU support
are not relevant, but reasonable pricing is, the somewhat oldish, boring
and robust stuff tends to work quite well.
Hope this helps,
Arno
Thanks so much ...
--
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
