New Server / User, hello :)

[dirkinthedark]

Hello,

I'm in the process of upgrading my home server.  I'm coming from a SME / Contribs.org server and joining Unraid.  I just bought a key based on all the great youtube videos I've seen.  Since I'm in the design stage I'm looking for a little help and advice.  As I have been binging I have my head filled with everything and now am looking to filter it out and condense it. 
@SpaceInvaderOne  @ByteMyBits @HardwareHaven @Sycotix among many others.

Goals:

Secure

NAS

AUTO Photo Uploading from phone to server (Android Phones)
AUTO windows user syncs (Documents, ETC)
Gaming VM x 2 ( x 1 start)

Media Server (From LAN but ability via atleast VPN, if I can get something my Parents can use thats great)

Sonarr / Radarr
Game Servers for my children and their friends (Minecraft)

Stretch Goals:

Home Assistant

Bit Warden

Home Security
Non Secure Media Sharing (Guest FTP, etc)

Connection to WAN:
Fiber -> Fiber Modem (ISP Router) -> DMZ -> TP-Link Router -> Network
Currently my router handles all my incomming connection, DHCP, etc.  TP-Link
I am not opposed to throwing in another NIC into the unraid server and having it as my router.  This is how my SME server used to be before one of its NIC's failed.

 

About me:

I work out of town and would like a lot of the services to be available to me via VPN or other means.  I'm hoping the gaming vm is fast enough that I can stop upgrading my laptop and put more funds into a desktop video card.

 

About my family:

My wife takes a lot of photos with her phone and has trouble just transfering her data to a SMB share.  I want to make sure it is as easy as can be.  

My kids use chrome books for now and I want to give them more graphics power with the VM's

I would possibly like the option of providing my family the media server shares as well as possibly the photo backup for their photos. 

I'm attaching a couple photos of my current server and proposed server.

I'm also attaching my proposed hardware and harddisk layout.

I want to thank you for looking at my post, 

Have a great day.

Edited November 27, 2022 by dirkinthedark
I found Sycotix ( IBRACORP) credit

[dirkinthedark]

I can fit another sata card in my PC as well for those floating 1.5 tb drives.

Further I have access to another 6+ 500gb ssd if I so choose.  
Right now I only have about 2gb of data.

[dirkinthedark]

I was going to use my SSD's in the array to enable the cache as I didn't know how that would work with ZFS.

However I've found this post here

So I will probably just enable my 1 TB SSD's as a ZFS cache and add the 3x0.5 TB SSD's as another ZFS Pool.

Let me know your thoughts, 

 

Thank you

 

[dirkinthedark]

[dirkinthedark]

Turns out zfs cache is useless, will have to think about this some more.

[dirkinthedark]

Ok,

Best solution seems to be make a SSD ZFS Pool and a Spinning ZFS Pool
The SSD ZFS pool will host everything and then I will move files in a cron job once a day / week over into the spinning pool.

I will also spin down the pool (and hopefully not quarry it).  (This is a heated topic as far as I can tell power vs drive wear, however if you can go a week without spin up it will be good)
 

So in short 2 pools, custom mover script.  

To find files older than x days the following line is used:
Script:

wake up drives?

find /sourcedirectory -maxdepth 1 -atime +(time in days) -type f -exec mv "{}" /destination/directory/ \;

rsync the vm's and dockers?

spin down drives

 

More research is required.

[dirkinthedark]

Ok, so from what I can see the most efficient way to do this would be 2 usb drives.|

One hosting the normal array with sym links to the zpool on the spinning disk array (ZFS)

One hosting the cache array with sym links to the zpool on the SSD disk array (ZFS)

That way all the cool features of unraid still work as normal (mover, cache, etc)