Am Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 06:26:39AM -0500 schrieb Dale: > I looked into the Raspberry and the newest version, about $150 now, > doesn't even have SATA ports. I can add a thing called a "hat" I think > that adds a couple but thing is, that costs more and still isn't > enough.
I run a raspi with some basic services, most importantly a pihole DNS filter and a PIM server. But I find it hacky-patchy with its flimsy USB power cable poking out of the side. I’d prefer a more sturdy construction, which is why I bought a NAS-style PC (zotac zbox nano with a passive 6 W Celeron). But that thing is so fast for every-day computing that I actually put a KDE system on it and now I don’t want to “downgrade” it to a mere server. > I have a old computer that I might could use. It is 4 core something > and I think it has 4GBs of memory, maxed out. I think it will perform > well enough but wish it had a little more horses in it. An Intel Celeron from the Haswell generation (i.e. 8+ years old) did not have AES-NI yet, and it reached around 160 MB/s encryption speed. I tried it, because I had dealings with those processors in the past before I built my own NAS. Your old tech may still be usable, but please also consider power cost and its impact on the environment if it runs 24/7. > I looked at something called ITX but they have only one PCIe slot > usually. That's not enough. I'd like to have two 6 or 8 port SATA > cards. Then balance the drives on each. I think some of the through > put is shared so the more drives on it, the slower it can be. I'd like > to have two such cards. 12 or 16 drives should be enough to last a > while. > > Part of me wants to do RAID but not sure about that. Dealing with so many drives, I think there’s no getting around RAID. All drives fail. The more drives you have, the earlier the first failure. With that many drives, I wouldn’t want to handle syncs between them by hand in order to get redundancy or backups of backups. > While I don't think I need a super powerful machine, I do want enough > that it will perform well. The question is: what do you need it to perform? If it’s just storing and serving files, save the bucks and use any low-end x86 processor with AES instructions. My NAS first ran on the above mentioned Celeron, but later I did upgrade to a low-power i3 (because the case¹ is very cramped, I don’t want too much heat in there). It is a dual-core with SMT and AES at 35 W. IIRC, it can encrypt around 800-something MB/s. And that is an old i3-4170. Modern chips are most probably much faster still. > I may use actual NAS software too. What is “actual NAS software”? Do you mean a NAS distribution? From my understanding, those distros install the usual services (samba, ftp, etc.) and develop a nice web frontend for it. But since those are web applications, there isn’t much to be gained from march=native. I still run Gentoo on my NAS, just for the old habit and because it comes with ZFS right out of the box. But the services I still configure the classical way – ssh, vim and config files. > I'm sure Gentoo would work to with proper tweaking but then I need to > deal with compiling things. Of course, no libreoffice or anything big so > it may not be to bad. Thing is, the NAS software will likely be more > efficient since it is designed for the purpose. More efficient than what? My NAS is powered up every few weeks or often months. And then the first thing I do is—of cours—a world update. And as you mentioned, the install base is rather small. No graphical stuff whatsoever (server board, small ASMedia VGA chip on-board, no Intel graphics). The biggest pkgs are gcc (around 2 hours build time) and llvm. The rest is user land stuff that helps me in dealing with the media files the NAS serves. Mkvtoolnix is a compile hog at around half an hour. > I just know I need a proper machine for the task. I'm getting lots of > data fast now. I hit the 80% mark overnight. At 90%, I consider it > critical. Something must be done soon. How about watching the spoils for a change instead of only ever downloading it? ;-) ¹ https://www.inter-tech.de/en/products/ipc/storage-cases/sc-4100 -- Grüße | Greetings | Salut | Qapla’ Please do not share anything from, with or about me on any social network. Everything has its two sides. But a quadrangle has three.
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