Homelabs

What should I do? X9 Pro 1TB, X9 2TB, or X9 Pro 2TB? I don't really have the money for a 2TB but the small difference feels like a no brainer?

(This is to occupy one of the thunderbolt 3 ports on my 2018 mac mini homelab server)

going full SSD is a pain in the wallet for sure.

Can you add a drive later? If not, I usually bite the bullet and get the larger one. Buy cheap = buy twice.

Yeah I’m sure you’re right. TBH, a lot of this is just, I don’t want to create too many new learning curves because I’ll wear out the patience of the people around me if I’m spending months tinkering and breaking things along the way. I’ve already cancelled all my video streaming services (one year of Crave with HBO and Netflix is equivalent to half of this entire project’s cost!) so I need something production ready or I’ll be in trouble.

I feel like all these issues are "people who don't use unraid" problems. But valid lol

I don’t want spinning disks is all. They’re noisy, hot and have to spin up, and the more often they spin up the faster they wear out. If I start handling long term backups I might consider them but even then I think I’d prefer the shock resistance of SSDs. 

I was thinking about a raid enclosure but it’s not even that much more cost effective and it adds a lot of bulk plus the management of RAID feels like a headache. These things are so tiny the pics don’t even do them convey how small they are. I can velcro/elastic a handful of them into a brick and combined with the mini the footprint will be trivial. 

I do agree about cheap over twice. Luckily I recouped almost $100 when it turned out the ram I bought wasn’t needed because the listing was wrong.