Am Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 09:01:21PM -0600 schrieb Dale:

> > If you just want to use it as a file server, think of removing the video
> > card. This will save considerable power.
> 
> It would be a good idea but it's a built in mobo video system.  If it
> was a card, I'd likely do just that for the reason you give. 

Ah, I see.

> I just found a IBM ServeRaid M1015 card for like $40.00 shipping and
> all.  It claims this:  "Connects to up to 16 SAS or SATA drives".  Given
> the number of drives and the price, that's good bang for buck there. 

Take not on wether it allows you to address the drives individually or if it
only does its RAID thingy. For my own personal purposes, I'd never use
anything that trust my data to a single hardware component. I've heard
stories of raid cards that if they break, you need an identical replacement
or the data is kaputt. For that reason I only ever used software RAID which
makes me independent of the hardware underneath.

> You may want to make note of that for the future.  Maybe you can find a
> good deal.  It has some good reviews.  I also found some good deals on
> SAS drives, new even.  Some I found are pulls where they upgrade but
> never used the drives.  If the price is right, I'm good with that. 

Sounds like a plan.

> You may want to look on Ebay for a Fractal Node 804, maybe Amazon too. 

I was making suggestions for you, I am not looking myself. ;-) (Although
sometimes I wonder whether I should go for a 6-bay system, because I am at
around 80 % use of capacity now, and though shalt not go over that on ZFS.
But I have loads of DVDs that I can still convert to more efficient
compression, giving me back 100s of GB. That's a chore for the upcoming
holidays.
When I was planning the build, I think I also looked at the Node 304. But it
was too big for my taste (I like it small and compact) and had no hot swap.
I admit I never had any use for hotswapping yet, but it's nice to have and
to see the idividual HDD leds do their stuff. :)

> I bought a Cooler Master HAF-932 years ago.  As long as mobos fit in it,
> I'll use it for any future builds.  It has great cooling and quite a bit
> of hard drive spaces.

My main PC case was chosen maxed out from the start for what I wanted to do
with it: one system SSD, one data HDD, one ODD (mainly to watch and store
video DVDs), one HDD hotswap bay (for old and external drives and for
backups), space for a not-too-big GPU. It's been running fine for over 6
years now. Only downside: you get either well made cases, or compact cases.
It seems both in one case is not available. My case is made from thin
sheets, which makes the system louder to my ears than necessary.

> Looks pretty good too.  I'm not into the LEDs and
> all that stuff.  Just function, no glitzy stuff required. 

Design is quite important for me. I don't want glossy surfaces, or
aggressive gamer designs. I like black boxes. Go ask my ThinkPad or my Eizo
monitor. :)

> I likely need to jump into RAID but I just do backups.  Then hope for the
> best.  Weighing positives and negatives gets rough.  ;-)

A bit OT now, going into the backup subject.

I don't backup the NAS. People say RAID is not a backup. What they mean is
backup from accidental deletion or malware attacks. To me, it is a backup,
but from hardware defects. I use RaidZ2 (ZFS-speek for RAID 6), so any two
of the four drives may fail without loss of data. But with four drives, this
gives me a space efficiency of only 50 %, hence the thought of going 6-bay.

The most regular "backup" I do is a unison sync of ~ and some other folders
between PC and laptop. It is very fast and allows me to have everything that
is important be up-to-date without much effort. But I've never backed up my
teensie raspi (remember, it contains my PIM server) or my whole laptop ever
since it got an upgrade to a 2 TB SSD. (My PC's data drive is only 1 TB.)

Before I built my NAS, my largest drive was an external 3 TB USB drive. It
was my main video storage (naturally w/o backup). Since I built the NAS,
I've never used it again. So a few weeks ago, I repurposed it as my main
backup drive. It's at least 6 years old, but only has ~280 hours on the
meter. In the past, I only (semi-regularly) backed up my main PC via
rsnapshot to an old 1 TB disk sitting permanently in the swap bay.

I've always wanted to try out borg backup. Thanks to that, I now have a
backup of my system, home and data partitions of my main PC *and* my laptop,
plus the entire raspi. But due to to borg's deduplication magic, the 3 TB
drive is only about half filled, even though it contains several weekly
snapshots already, amounting to almost 7 TB across hosts.

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