Home Lab
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Why I Replaced RAID-10 (mostly) With RAID-1 in My Home Lab
No comments on Why I Replaced RAID-10 (mostly) With RAID-1 in My Home LabRAID-10 on a hardware controller has some real advantages over RAID-1, particularly when it comes to performance. And with four drives instead of two, it can tolerate certain combinations of drive failures that would take down a simple mirror. At my organization, we’d been running servers in-house for many years, and we’d always used mirrored…
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Rebuilding My Aging Plex Server: Linux Mint 19.3 to Mint 22.3
I have been running Plex for a long time. Like a lot of things in my home lab, the Plex server has been upgraded and modified over the years, but the underlying operating system hasn’t received nearly as much attention. It has just worked. My current Plex server is a virtual machine running Linux Mint…
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Why Everything in My Home Lab Is on a UPS
Way back at the dawn of time (late 90s), I lived in a duplex for a couple years. I’d purchased a new PC and monitor and thought all was going to be good. However, the new purchase would randomly power cycle, even when working on it. OS corruption followed. Reinstalling the factory OS a couple…
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PVE Backups vs. Proxmox Backup Server: Why I Use Both
When my home servers ran ESXi, Veeam (the Community edition for the server backups) kept the critical VMs protected, and did that extremely well. It is a product I’ve used at home and the office for almost the same amount of time. When I migrated the servers completely to Proxmox, I suddenly had two different…
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Why My Backup Targets Don’t Use RAID
I use RAID quite a bit in my home lab. My main servers have redundant storage, and I’ve used RAID-1 and RAID-10 for years. If a drive fails in one of my primary storage arrays, I don’t want the server or its storage disappearing while I wait for a replacement drive. My backup machines are…
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Cheap Backup Storage With Old Hardware
Hard drive prices have been going the wrong direction lately, which makes building large amounts of backup storage more expensive than it used to be. One place I haven’t spent much money, though, is on the computers that hold those backup drives. In fact, I currently have three backup machines built from computers that cost…
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Why I Buy Enterprise Drives for My Home Lab
I’ve purchased a lot of hard drives for my home lab over the years, and for quite a while now most of them have had two things in common: they’re enterprise drives, and they’re used. That combination probably sounds questionable to some people. Why put years-old drives pulled from somebody else’s server into machines holding…
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