Before you scream at your screen, I am aware this setup isn’t ideal, to say the least, my Self-hosting has been composed of a laptop with a usb carry with a 2.5 1tb hard drive. I recent made up my mind about getting a couple 4 tb server hdd (heard barracuda are relatively silent) to run software raid 1, since I can’t find a budget double bay carry (that I can purchase locally) I’ve decided I’ll get a couple 3.5 inch usb cases and get a splitter to run the power from just just one brick.
My question is regarding resiliency, I get occasional blackouts and low tension every now and then, a few times a year but it can be a few times in a day. I’ve never had hardware dying because of it and I don’t have a UPS, but I worry I could be risking data corruption or something swapping to this setup because of the extra power those drives will need being fed from the wall instead of the laptop (the laptop feeds the current drive over usb alone and it has a battery) which could be abruptly cut off every now and then. Right now, the worst this has caused has been having ro reboot the system because it got unmounted but never had a loss of data from this.
Am I worrying for nothing? Would it be just the same? Should I just put this off until (if) I can afford the drives plus a ups? So far I’ve had my server for basically free, but I’m running out of space for family photos and I kinda have to upgrade.
I would highly suggest a UPS. I use random external hard drives without RAID as part of my media setup. The electric went out overnight last year. I knew it had happened as my oven was flashing. The server restarted itself so thought everything was fine.
Then some things were glitchy and it took me a few days to release one of the drives was not mounting. Luckily I did not lose the data but it still took a while to fix. It takes even longer to restore a backup.
To mainly save myself time and effort, I bought a basic UPS with 2 plugs. It keeps the server and main router on for 15 minutes but I’ve set it up to send a command to shut down asap just in case. My server seems to automatically switch on when power comes back so not had any issues since.