n2burns

From the article

Some products — like devices powered by combustion engines ... — are excluded from Oregon’s rules entirely.

I’m mainly concerned about:

1. Not losing data if one drive dies on me.

Sure, that's what RAID is designed to do. However, I'd suggest also looking into what happens when your array is degraded and how to rebuild it.

2. Fast reads

I'm a bit surprised you need fast reads with a media server. You're probably going to have to clarify your needs a bit more.

3. Easy plug and play expansion

Since I’ll have 8 drives (or 6, if I use the smaller server, it would be nice if I could swap out one of them without losing data and add a larger one, which would then get used automatically. Is that something that RAID is good for?

Standard RAID levels generally don't have options to add larger drives. I'm not sure what you mean by "plug and play". I'm pretty sure almost all setups will involve a fair bit of configuration.

I’m hesitant to set up backups because it’s going to be a lot of data.

It's also a lot of data to lose if things go more wrong than you expected (multi-drive failure, bit-rot, etc.).

Is HBA mode that rare? It seems pretty common. Either way, we don't know OP's hardware.

And I'm not scared of RAID controller failure, I'm scared of single point failure. I know it's highly unlikely, but the risk for stranded data is unacceptable IMHO unless you're recommending OP make sure they have a spare on hand.

Also, I never even mentioned ZFS (I've actually never even used it).

It's sounds like what you're looking for is backup, and RAID is not backup, it's redundancy to maintain uptime (as well as data integrity, and in some cases performance). I'd highly recommend you look into backup options, with best case being a 3-2-1 backup strategy.

To be fair, I'm being a little hypocritical. I've been working on my backup strategy for years and still don’t have any remote backups yet. Personally, I have a JBOD system, with 8 drives ranging from 2TB to 8TB, so my setup might be a bit complicated for your purposes. I’m not worried about uptime, and am focused on data integrity. I’m not using actual RAID because in the case of a catastrophic failure, I don’t want to lose all my data. I use snapRAID to create some redundancy, and I pool my data drives using mergerfs.

If you are still interested in RAID, I would recommend staying away from hardware RAID as I’ve commented in other places of this post. It has it’s place in data centres but really doesn’t make sense for consumers anymore. There is a lot of good advice in the rest of the comments about RAID, so I’ll summarize my thoughts. If you only plan on having 2 drives, RAID 1 is a good option, though it’s generally used for it’s write performance and that’s probably not necessary on a media server. My current server is running on decade old, lower-end, consumer hardware, and even in that extreme case, media sometimes takes a second to start 1080p content remotely. If you want to add drives and are willing to expand in redundant pairs, you you can either add another RAID layer (RAID 1+0), or pool the partitions together. If you want to be able to expand by single drives/have more than 50% of your potential storage be realized, you could look at RAID 5/6 or ZFS/btrfs. Note that for RAID 5/6, drives need to be equal size.

Yes, but they're using it in a consumer setting. That was the whole point of my comment. It sounds like they may have 2 identical RAID controllers, which means they might have a spare. However, if one dies, they'd be looking at obtaining another spare, migrating their data to a new setup, or risking complete data loss.

You're right, hardware RAID still has some use for businesses, but it's generally a bad idea for consumers. The main reason is the procedure if the RAID controller fails. In commercial applications they have spare, compatible controllers, so a quick hardware swap and you're back up and running, you don't even need to rebuild the array. However, consumers generally don't have a spare controller, and if they don't, they can't just get any controller, they need a compatible one or the array is lost. If a system running a software RAID has a hardware failure, the array can be moved to a new host and mdadm can rebuild the array without needing specific hardware.

The article doesn't really explain it, but assume this is because you can't use 3rd party app stores on Fitbit devices? So to avoid opening to competition, they're removing anything that could be interpreted as a store?

If was all Blue States, with a Democratic Federal DOJ, it's quite possible that it's just political messaging. With a mix of Blue & Red States, it's still possible it's messaging or a (rare) common-enemy, but it's more likely they think something's actually there, and they don't want to waste their time playing nice with the "other side".

If it was all Blue States, if probably agree, but it does include a few Deep Red States with North Dakota, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Tennessee, etc. That makes me cautiously optimistic.

Agreed. I just see one that's brighter and that makes it hard to not prefer it.

"Thrift" doesn't mean it's a charity either, take for example Value Village. There are also a ton of "consignment stores" that are for profit businesses and will get real mad if you call them a thrift store.

Yup. I've volunteered at a couple thrift stores, and we'd just toss stuff like this.