I have a storage box in my house that stores important documents, backups, VM disk images, photos, a copy of the Tor Metrics archive and other odd things. I’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that it is both reliable and performant. When I was working on a modern CollecTor for Tor Metrics recently, I used this to be able to run the entire history of the Tor network through the prototype replacement to see if I could catch any bugs.
It’s very easy to set up libvirt with QEMU/KVM on a Linux box and have it work for a while. It’s more difficult to have a system set up that’s going to be somewhat robust and maintainable over a longer period of time. I am using a dedicated server from Hetzner. I have not personally had any serious problems with Hetzner, and price is the main reason that I’ve chosen them over other providers.
I’ve got a hard drive in a zpool that is starting to show some SMART errors. I’d really like to replace it, but unfortunately it’s in a zpool that is configured to stripe and not mirror. I do not have enough SATA ports or disks to convert it to stripe+mirror. Currently, it’s not possible to remove a drive from a striped zpool. You have to destroy the pool and start again.