Simple Hot Swap NAS

[afman123]

I would like to build a simple NAS that will run a VM or two, provide data backup services to 2-3 computers and potentially stream a few videos and rarely do a small bit of transcoding. Primarily the NAS will need to protect ~2TB of data. I would like to perform a monthly physical off-site backup of the data with a hand-carried 4TB drive. The plan is to run some sort of mirrored array of two 4TB WD Red drives and be able to swap one of them out monthly with a third one.

I would very much prefer a hot swappable drive option from the outside of the server tower since the procedure must be "wife approved". Hot swapping a drive should be easy enough for a non-IT savvy person.

I would like the ability to add additional drives and capability if needed later on.

Those are my main requirements.

I have identified some refurbished hardware that may meet those requirements, but I want to make sure that I'm not missing anything before I purchase the rig. Here is the rig I have found with 32GB of RAM (RAM is a bit more than actually needed but may be useful for expanding later) :
Dell PowerEdge T110II:
https://www.newegg.com/dell-poweredge-t110-ii-tower/p/2NS-0008-4NN79

Drive caddy:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07JZ8X9HR/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=A2UZVIGPN3KFSH&psc=1

SSD dual boot drive tray:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L8BMN9W/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A2YG2WVMMD1BTL&psc=1

SSD mirrored boot drives:
https://www.newegg.com/shark-ssd-32g-32gb/p/0D9-00DD-00002?Item=9SIAG9J80A9681

Will this rig with the Dell PERC H200 be able to support hot swappable or hot-plug WD Red SATA drives? I understand that the FreeBSD based FreeNAS OS does support this. Will I need any additional hardware to support hot swap or hot-plug? Will I need the SAS to SATA breakout cables:
(https://www.ebay.com/itm/2x-Mini-SA...:sc:USPSFirstClass!80118!US!-1&frcectupt=true)

Or should I not even bother using the H200 controller? I'm just starting to learn more about ZFS and have seen that hardware RAID is not recommended when using ZFS.

I have scavenged the forums, but couldn't find specifically the answers I was looking for. Any help is appreciated.

 

[Inxsible]

Personally, I'd stay away from hot-swapping in a mirrored pool. While you are hotswapping, you have zero redundancy if shit hits the fan.

I'd go with a RAIDZ2 setup -- if hot swapping is a must have.

 

[sretalla]

I'd go with a RAIDZ2 setup -- if hot swapping is a must have.

Or 3-way mirrors. Depending on the performance goals also. (and budget)

 

[afman123]

Thanks for the feedback. I like the 3-way mirror idea, but I'm still determining if it's worth the extra cost. I think the lack of redundancy during the re-silvering/swap isn't a terrible concern. The availability of the data/system is less of a concern than the off-site redundancy. I hope that I understand the risks being presented. But as I understand it, during a catastrophic failure of both drives during a hot-swap, I would be able to go retrieve the off-site drive to restore functionality of the system and data, then procure or recover a drive to restore lost redundancy. This would be acceptable for my home application.

However, is there any reason that the hardware I found above wouldn't be able to support these goals? Is there significant equipment components that I'm missing? I briefly read in a pdf that the Dell T110II didn't natively support hot-plugging, but the Dell T310 apparently does.
https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/poweredge_t110_II_technical_guide.pdf

My research seems to indicate that using the Dell PERC H200 with SATA breakout cables should be better able to support hot-plugging the drives.

 

[Inxsible]

I think the lack of redundancy during the re-silvering/swap isn't a terrible concern.

On the contrary, it's of the utmost importance during a re-silvering which will always occur when you swap hard-drives.

The availability of the data/system is less of a concern than the off-site redundancy.

The availability of the system is irrelevant, when during a re-silvering process your other drive kicks the bucket which happens often enough to worry me. If you have zero redundancy, then you lose all your data on your pool.

And since you are hot-swapping, I am assuming that the "3rd" HDD is also part of the ZFS pool -- and you are only swapping the drives every now and again. So that drive alone is also not going to be able to get you all of your data back depending on how far back you swapped drives.

 

[afman123]

I think we are indeed on the same page. However, I was not aware that drive failures are a significant concern during a re-silver. Seems that the re-silver process may not be as reliable as I thought. But to clarify, although I may lose two drives during a re-silver, the third "off-site" drive may still be an acceptable option with whatever data loss was incurred. This would not fly at an enterprise level, but a few pictures and QuickBooks transactions probably wouldn't be a huge loss.

Does anyone see any glaring hardware issues with this setup and being hot swappable?

 

[SweetAndLow]

I think we are indeed on the same page. However, I was not aware that drive failures are a significant concern during a re-silver. Seems that the re-silver process may not be as reliable as I thought. But to clarify, although I may lose two drives during a re-silver, the third "off-site" drive may still be an acceptable option with whatever data loss was incurred. This would not fly at an enterprise level, but a few pictures and QuickBooks transactions probably wouldn't be a huge loss.

Does anyone see any glaring hardware issues with this setup and being hot swappable?

The resilver process is extremely reliable, the disk however are not reliable.
Are you set on this hand carry offsite solution? Seems like lots of extra work to me but it's fine if you want to do that. I would just use a cloud backup solution.

 

[afman123]

Yes I'm set on the hand-carry solution. I'm not a fan of cloud backups for many reasons, and they are not wife approved. We also live rurally on an semi-reliable low-bandwidth connection, so I don't want to rely on that for a backup.

It is a lot of extra work, but for emergency and forest-fire risks we maintain an off-site backup for important documents and other data.

 

[afman123]

Does anyone have any feedback on the hardware that is listed being able to perform a hot-swap/hot-plug? That is my main question that I would still appreciate feedback on from someone who is more familiar with this set-up.