Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

any specific reason why switch?

I've heard smaller, older drives are actually more reliable in the long run. USB 2.0 especially because of the lower speed causes less heat

I had an issue recently where my usb drive was "disconnecting" which triggered unraid to give read errors and then panicking. I had checked though and it wasn't being regularly read or written to but still caused my whole server to crash. Changing usb drive has since fixed it, for now 😄

remotely is a challenge for me right now

I've seen you mention this a few times and like mentioned elsewhere in here, set yourself a Tailnet up.

It's fugging brilliant, the docs are wrote by some very clever people (note, I am best described as a copy / pasta person?) and are through, and you can use a github or even a Google account for authentication.

Even grabbing a cheapo raspberry pi4 gives you a 1GB port (the rpi3 only has a 100Mbps rj-45 port and would still suffice for lesser needs) for your own ~~VPN~~ Wireguard to home, that is P2P encrypted and can be used as an Exit Node / subnet router

ie: if you're on someone else's internet/cellular you can simply hit up your exit node to break out of any nanny filters, stop anyone else noseying at your traffic (obv bar your ISP seeing outgoing requests unless you have a another...VPN on your router), and also view and/or manage any devices on your home network/Tailnet by IP address.

Hell, I dumped a rpi down at a family members house that is part of the "stack" so I can help out remotely but it seems someone has knocked the aerial out of the HAT again :/

Best thing ever.

https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/ Check out proxmox, then check out the above scripts and start with the post install script, then something like Ubuntu to get a feel, you can use the other scripts for specific containers

I did a quick search, looks like Proton has a WireGuard implementation, which is what I use. I use transmission for torrenting, and jellyfin for streaming

Yes, what you're saying is the idea, and why I went with this setup.

I am running raidz2 on all my arrays, so I can pull any 2 disks from an array and my data is still there.

Currently I have 3 arrays of 8 disks each, organized into a single pool.

You can set similar up with any raid system, but so far Truenas has been rock solid and intuitive to me. My gripes are mostly around the (long) journey to "just Docker" for services. The parts of the UI / system that deals with storage seems to have a high focus on reliability / durability.

Latest version of Truenas supports Docker as "apps" where you can input all config through the UI. I prefer editing the config as yaml, so the only "app" I installed is Dockge. It lets me add Docker compose stacks, so I edit the compose files and run everything through Dockge. Useful as most arrs have example Docker compose files.

For hardware I went with just an off-the-shelf desktop motherboard, and a case with 8 hot swap bays. I also have an HBA expansion card connected via PCI, with two additional 8 bay enclosures on the backplane. You can start with what you need now (just the single case/drive bays), and expand later (raidz expansion makes this easier, since it's now possible to add disks to an existing array).

If I was going to start over, I might consider a proper rack with a disk tray enclosure.

You do want a good amount of RAM for zfs.

For boot, I recommend a mirror at least two of the cheapest SSD you can find each in an enclosure connected via USB. Boot doesn't need to be that fast. Do not use thumb drives unless you're fine with replacing them every few months.

For docker services, I recommend a mirror of two reasonable size SSDs. Jellyfin/Plex in particular benefit from an SSD for loading metadata. And back up the entire services partition (dataset) to your pool regularly. If you don't splurge for a mirror, at least do the backups. (Can you tell who previously had the single SSD running all of his services fail on him?)

For torrents I am considering a cache SSD that will simply exist for incoming, incomplete torrents. They will get moved to the pool upon completion. This reduces fragmentation in the pool, since ZFS cannot defragment. Currently I'm using the services mirror SSDs for that purpose. This is really a long-term concern. I've run my pool for almost 10 years now, and most of the time wrote incomplete torrents directly to the pool. Performance still seems fine.

I think there's some deffo better OSes than my suggestions for RAID setups and stuff, bar ProxMox. Maybe it is worth you looking into those options!

That being said, any OS can torrent shit just fine. If it can run Docker or other containers (so 99% of suggestions here) you're set.

Maybe if you can spare the hardware try setting up a RAID on a couple of different ISOs to test em. That'll be the harder, or more permanent, aspect of the setup I think.