Dell PowerEdge P250 Gen III server

Hello everyone,

Looking for a bunch of advice. Currently I have just one WD external HD that holds 711GB of pictures. I have another Seagate external HDD that can not hold as many picture for me to get a redundant backup of my photos.

I was able to pickup a working Dell PowerEdge P250 Gen III server a few years back dirt cheap, never used it back then. The server has six slots, two slots have 1TB HDD's and the other four have 2TB HDD's in them. The server and HDD's are all in working condition.

The server is connected to my PC via FE. The server will not be connected to a switch/router so this won't be a true NAS setup. I have connectivity between my PC and the server and can manage the server via VMWare Esxi, and this is as much as I know about servers and storage.

What would be the best RAID setup for this server? Stupid question time, can I utilize the two 1TB drives with the other 2TB drives or do all the slots need to have the same size HDD's?

I will not have the server on all the time since it sounds like I have a small jet waiting for take off in the room, I'll only fire it up after my shoots.

I am not a pro photographer.

I'm looking for best advice/practice for using this server until I save up for a desktop four bay server at some point.

Thank you all in advance for your input.

Mike

I'm no expert on this sort of setup by any means, but it sounds to me
as if it's a perfect candidate for FreeNAS or some other NAS software.

Personally, I'd love to have a machine like that to try it out with.
I've been pondering how to setup an older PC rig to do what you're after.

If it were me, I'd run the 2x 1TB drives as a raid-1 mirror array and then the 4x 2TB drives as a separate raid-5 array.
That way you can survive a single drive failure on either array before losing data

I've got a HP DL180 server running as a similar file backup storage, but all the drives are same size, and I've just set them all up as raid-5
(as with you, it's really noisy so I shut it down when not in use)