I know it’s a rude question, but it’s been on my mind… I’m wondering roughly what I should be expecting to outlay when I finish my set-up? So I’m assuming it includes things like domain names, hosting for backups, email providers, VPN, etc. What’s a good budget to set?
It really depends on what you’re doing. In my case the soft costs like domains are pretty negligible compared to how much I seem to spend on more hard disks every six months. You might tell yourself, “96 TB of raw storage will last forever,” but it turns out forever is about a year.
I beg your pardon? 96 terabytes every twelve months?
That’s a slight exaggeration. I think it was about 2 years to get close to filling that up. Keep in mind that a chunk of that is unusable due to drive parity.
Are all of those drives powered up constantly? What’s your power bill like?
If I remember correctly ZFS keeps the whole array running whenever one is active (which is basically always). If I remember, I’ll check my UPS when I get home to see the actual power draw. The storage itself is probably cheaper to run than the main server in the rack - a gen8 HP 360p, which is a bit on the old side and I’d guess not terribly efficient being a 1U piece with many small high-powered fans running constantly.
Electricity here isn’t too expensive though, being public hydro power.
I have 5 20TB HDDs in a RAID array at home, in the real world I get a little over 72 of them. I can lose one disk and have no data loss, though
As for how quickly you fill it up, I’d say that really depends on how much data is redundant and how many backups you want to keep.