Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

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Mark Knecht wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 4:59 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com
> <mailto:rdalek1967@gmail.com>> wrote:
> <SNIP>
> > I may do some mobo hunting shortly.  See what little thing I can buy
> > that is powerful enough.  I don't think a Raspberry Pi is enough.  It
> > gets close tho.  Biggest thing, I'd need a lot of SATA ports.  LOTS of
> > them.
>
> Granted, I had a couple of old cases which lowered the cost but
> I went to a local computer store and bought used motherboards
> that came with processors and memory. They were both Core i7
> but I paid only about $75 each. I needed power supplies and hard drives
> so each machine ended up around $350 or so by the time I was done.
> Each has 2 4TB drives for storage and a 1TB drive for the OS. A lot
> of used motherboards have on-board VGA and Gb/S networking.
>
> These are TrueNAS machines, FreeBSD not Linux, but they have
> a Linux version now if that makes you more comfortable. 
>
> I'd stick with AMD64 as it's better tested and I don't think you'll
> get the network throughput you need to be fast with a Raspberry Pi


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 really don't like USB and hard drive mixing.  Every time I do
that, the hard drive turns into a door stop.  Currently, I have three
Rosewill external enclosures and they have USB and eSATA ports.  I use
the eSATA connections and no problems.  It's also really fast.  So, I
plan to stick with SATA connections.

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.

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.  Yet.  I
think I'm just going to go with ATX since it has several PCIe slots. 

While I don't think I need a super powerful machine, I do want enough
that it will perform well.  I may use actual NAS software too.  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. 

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. 

Keep those ideas coming.  I'll put them in the blender and see what
comes out.  ;-)

Dale

:-)  :-) 

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