Advice setting up my Zimaboard 2 storage

Insight & Feedback
1

I would appreciate advice for setting up my storage.

Zimaboard 2 with
2 x Lexar NM790 1TB M.2 SSD
and
2 x Seagate St4000Vn008 Ironwolf

I want to use it to run immich for my family. Probably later also document backups and plex…

Should I use raid 1 or raid 5? All four storage devices. Or 3 devices in raid and 1 for the apps?

I’m very new in the homeserver thing, but willing to learn alot :wink:

thanks

2

For your setup, I personally would avoid mixing the SSDs and HDDs into the same RAID array.

You have two very different types of storage there:

  • 2 × fast NVMe SSDs
  • 2 × large HDDs

They each suit different jobs.

For an Immich + Plex + backups setup, a very solid beginner-friendly layout would be:

  1. Use the 2 × Lexar NM790 SSDs as RAID1
    This gives you:
  • fast app performance
  • database protection
  • redundancy if one SSD failsPut:
  • ZimaOS apps
  • Immich appdata/database
  • thumbnails/cache
  • Docker dataon the SSD mirror.
  1. Use the 2 × IronWolf drives as RAID1
    This becomes your bulk storage:
  • photos/videos
  • Plex media
  • document backups
  • family files

This is simpler, safer, and easier to manage long term.

I would not recommend RAID5 with only 4 mixed drives, especially as a beginner. RAID5 also rebuilds slowly on large HDDs and adds more complexity. Mixing SSD + HDD in one RAID array usually just means the SSDs get slowed down to HDD performance anyway.

Also important:
RAID is not a backup. If family photos matter, still keep another backup somewhere else later:

  • USB drive
  • another NAS
  • cloud backup
  • etc.

For Immich specifically, SSD storage for the database/app side makes a huge difference in responsiveness.

Honestly, your hardware is already a really nice setup for a first homelab

1 Like
3

Just need to say that this is excellent advice.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the advice :slightly_smiling_face: . Good to have a forum like this!

Going to set it up as proposed above.

Meanwhile I’m reading and watching topics about homeservers and raid and so… Very interesting!