My Home Server has Died

#DIY #self-hosting

Well, it finally happened. I neglected my home server until it gave up completely. The data on it can be retrieved on other various drives, so it's no big deal (other than being without my Jellyfin and Minecraft server instance for a bit).

Motherboard: Intel N100
Ram: 16GB
Storage: 7+ year old 4x10TB used HDD in a RAIDZ configuration

I'm honestly surprised these drives didn't fail outright when they were bouncing around in the car when moving thousands of miles a little over a year ago, but then I had the great idea of putting the server on top of the living room subwoofer, which might have hurt it every single day until it died. The drives are over 7 years old and have been through a lot of mistreatment while I figured out how best to cosplay as a sysadmin poorly. Two of my 4 drives died at nearly the same time and I could never figure out how to get the server to email me when drives have issues.

Anyway, the next step is to get replacement drives so I can set up my server and restore the data on the disks again. I think I'll do things a bit differently this time (though I still think I'll be buying used disks because if you find a good warrantee, it is nearly worth the headache). First I have to figure out which drives have died and send the serial code to do an RMA for a couple of replacement drives. (hopefully the 5 year warrantee is still applicable- I've had this server for a while)

I think I'll want to keep an off-device markdown file as a sort of inventory for my drive just so I can account things that are on there in case this happens again. I did say that all my important files have been backed up in other locations, but there was also mid-tier junk that is now lost with my memory being the only thing that could bring it back. I think keeping a markdown file also makes it so I don't fill the drives with random files as often since I won't want to spend a ton of time in the markdown file accounting for junk.

That's all I can think of for now, but if I think of anything else, I'll report back.