What's the best way to handle a large amount of storage?

Server-tier quality is to reduce downtime, not to increase data security.
Data security is all about accepting that there is an annual failure rate on storage devices, and having duplicate copies of the data ready to replace said data. Having a hard drive fail is common, but having two hard drives both fail at the same time containing both copies of your data is very uncommon.
Server tier shit is to minimise the time spent restoring from backup, but as someone who just hoards porn or anime or whatever, that's not a big issue.
Stick with consumer level stuff, but go for data duplicity.
I'm no expert on RAID but some system where you have two hard drives cloned per copy of data and it should be pretty robust.

Server tier equipment is an order of magnitude more expensive, by the way.

>>58000483
Thanks.

>someone who just hoards porn or anime or whatever
Yep, that's basically my use case.

>Stick with consumer level stuff, but go for data duplicity.
This is what I'm confused about.

0) Is it possible to setup a Raid with drives that have existing data. I have 10 drives.

1) How many additional drives will I need in order to have mirroring/stripping on all 10 drives?

2) In order to create the raid, do my existing drives need to all be the same size/same manufacturer?

3) Do the additional drives need to be the same size/same manufacturer?

>>58000678
0 - no
1 - a bunch, look up RAID 6
2 - same size
3 - same size

>>58000367
Get any mobo/cpu/jbod sata card. Cram as many easily obtainable disks you want of the appropriate size in there and run a ZFS system on it.

Be sure to put a good amount of ram in there as well for dedup.

>>58000935
>0 - no

Well fuck.

So I'm going to need 20x drives then.
10x drives will be usable(to copy my existing data to since i cant raid with existing drives of different sizes)
10x drives for mirror/stripping(not usable)

I guess paying $2,600 for RAID isn't that bad.

I really don't understand why cabinets are so expensive, they aren't that high tech.

>>58001003
How does ZFS handle deduplication with JBOD? how do I know how many extra drives I need for all of them to have parity data

>>58001073
It depends on the z raid you use. the three types are analogs to raid 5, 6, or 10 in terms of drive loss array survival.

ZFS itself prevents bitrot and it works best with generic, non-raid mode controllers. i.e just a bunch of ports with disks. as many as you want.

You don't have to enable or use dedup, but if you do it takes a lot of ram.

You can get distros that are basically just ZFS file servers. Pretty easy overall.