getting started with an old Inspiron

[robbrown99]

Hi, I'm investigating unraid (also trialing TrueNAS and Open Media Vault). My primary use case is backup for multiple computers in a household.

 

For hardware I have an old Dell Inspiron 3470.

 

I am planning to use that to get started and put in a used SSD I have hanging about to run the unraid OS. For storage there's zero room inside for drives, so I'm going to buy a multi bay (4 or 5) usb 3 nas expander. I have two 6TB ironwolf drives that are currently in my computer (they are running as mirrored ZFS pool). I'm going to copy that data to a new hybrid drive and keep that in my main computer as the main storage disk; the Unraid will then be the backup.

 

Questions

 

1. I assume I can run external drives if the enclosure supports JBOD?

2. My main computer is Linux. Are there any unraid backup apps (im on Linux Mint ubuntu based), or should I just stick with what I have got already? I used freefilesync which seems to work well.

3. I see that the main storage disk format is btrfs. I'm probably going to go with that but would like to understand how to best configure it with just two drives. Or is it better to buy a couple more for fault tolerance? Is there any documentation to point to? ZFS has worked flawlessly for me for the past 10 years so I'm a little apprehensive.

 

Longer term I would invest in a dedicated multi bay case, but trying to keep costs low while I get things set up. The additional drive and nas enclosure may cost me 200US. Maybe I'm better off just finding an old server on ebay than doing this inspiron? I've toyed with removing the motherboard, psu from the inspiron and buying a nas case but it looks like the board format in the inspiron isn't a standard one.