Re: Anybody Still Here

On 3/12/24 6:40 AM, -hh wrote:

On 3/2/24 2:18 PM, Alan wrote:

On 2024-03-01 05:31, -hh wrote:

On 2/29/24 5:35 PM, Alan wrote:

On 2024-02-28 18:34, -hh wrote:

John <nopam@nospam.com> wrote:
[-hh wrote]
Yeah, still checking in periodically.  With the demise of GG, it’s a lot
less convenient, as it’s now a “go launch an app” instead of having a
webpage interface.
>
Meantime, I’ve been starting to debate getting a new NAS, versus taking an underutilized Mac mini I have and load it up
with some external HDDs and sharing them.

>
Would you really save much by reusing the Mini?

>
Probably some.  First, the Mini is currently doing nothing important,
so it is "free" vs buying a Synology NAS (probably the DS1522+ ($700);
for its storage pool, I have a decent number of external HDD's that I
could technically reuse .. for the drives to go therein, I have a huge
stack of "small" (under 8TB) capacities.
>

>
Ah! That changes the equation quite a bit.

 Indeed.
 

>
If both the "brain" of the NAS and the drives are sunk cost, the yeah, the Mini will save you.

 Well, the mini is a sunk cost, as is also the existing NAS, but buying another NAS (for more storage capacity) isn't a sunk cost.  Question is really if using the mini for this purpose is reasonable or not.  Answer to that comes down to the potential cost of external HDDs that I already have which would be 'free', as opposed to buying new HDDs for filling a new NAS.

Well, an update:
There was a discount run last month on some Synology NAS's so I picked up a new one, along with some HDDs to stuff into it.
I also repurposed some existing NVMe's to add a cache to it, but made the mistake of setting up the HDDs first, which means that the cache wasn't available to speed things up.  Lesson learned for next time.
Migrated from the old NAS to the new ... took a couple of days, as the data is being pushed across just a 1GBe Ethernet connection.
Starting to look at some other things...
Synology has a hybrid RAID (SHR) that's apparently pretty good; went with the "One-Drive Fault Tolerance" (SHR1) over 3 drives..its like RAID5, but apparently easier to later expand to more drives.
Synology's "Hyper Backup" App ... since I'm no longer RAID1, a good idea to start to have some more discipline to be backing up the backup.
Network .. time to start to look at finding an affordable 10GbE Ethernet switch, as the Mac Studio is already 10GbE and there's a PCIe expansion card for the NAS that can make it 10GbE too.  So far, it seems that pickings which have RJ45 connections at 10GbE are slim, but that's a way to save the expense of a couple of SPF+ converters.

Probably the big technical question is given the age of some of these
legacy HDD cases, they could have max drive capacity constraints
which would prevent me pulling their existing small 1-2TB drives and
replacing them with 10TB's to reuse the external drive cases.  A
"short list" example to look into first are a pair of ~ten year old
USB/FW400 NewerTech dual HDD cases.

Honestly, there is a hassle factor that I would be trying to avoid as well. You might save a few dollars by reusing the Mini, but doing all the research to see what your drive enclosures can support, and manually configuring a RAID...
>
...how many hours do you want to spend?

  Ideally, zero :-)
 But I'm figuring that a few hours is okay, especially since it would need to do an inventory all of the HDDs that I've accumulated over the years, and verify my redundant data backups, which I'm quite delinquent in having done anyway, so a chunk of this touch labor is notionally being "paid for" by this other existing 'maintenance overhead' task.
  -hh
 

And of course, through all of this, the mini has been parked to the side for awhile (again) along with the inventory of intermediate sized HDDs.
So that's still yet another project.
-hh