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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • Every drive can fail at any moment. Even a brand new one. It is just a bit less likely than having a decade old drive fail.

    If you care about your data make sure you have backups. 321rule.

    Yes, you can use a “NAS” drive pretty much like any normal drive. This is an SMR drive so not even a NAS drive to begin with.

    If you do not have backups pay a professional to recover it. Yes, this is wildly expensive but tinkering yourself can make recovery even more expensive or outright impossible.




  • It is impossible to fully eliminate the risk but with a decent backup system in place it is somewhat unlikely to lose all of your data.

    The 321rule should be used as a baseline. Your local backup should be snapshotted and somewhat hardened against ransomware (pull backups instead of pushing them, do not mount the backup volume to other machines). Cold backups also help.

    Can I construct scenarios in which I lose all my stuff? Sure. But in those, we are either in deep shit anyway (CME, some big astroid) or it is pretty unlikely (targeted hacking)








  • Unless you have to have your data always available a single 16TB drive will work just fine. ~£200 for the drive and it also consumes 10W and not 40. Likely pretty relevant in the long run in the UK.

    And when you need more storage use Unraid or mergerFS+Snapraid on Openmediavault. They both allow you to add single drives of any size to add storage capacity and parity. ZFS is great but it kinda sucks as a home user as expansion only works well when you add 6 or even 12 drives at a time. At least for now.



  • because I always write 100% full random data on the device before using it.

    Do you mean before every use or after receiving it?

    When you continuously write to a consumer SSD they will slow down for a while. They are built for short burst of writes because that is what most consumers do. For continuous fast writing you need better NAND, a better controller and better cooling.

    for a very long time

    Long term digital archiving is not really a solved issue. Your best bet is an active approach with multiple copies that are checked regularly.



  • This is a bit overkill although it depends a lot on what you will use your VMs for.

    I would make sure you set a TDP limit for the CPU. Some board makers totally disregard Intel guide lines and allow the CPU to pull like 200W+ continuously at full load. Limiting it to ~120W will not cost you a lot of performance but might save some power.

    650W is total overkill unless you add a ton more drives. Gold PSUs are not rated below 10% load. Here they can drop to 50% or less meaning a gold 650W might consume more than a Bronce 350W unit.

    I am personally not a big fan of ITX builds. You can only add a single PCIe card. And you might want to add an HBA, NIC, GPU (for transcoding), NVMe SSDs, or something else down the line. With an ITX board you can only add one. And this PC is not small anyways.


  • Not only a ton of work but likely also much more expensive than you might think even with free boxes. A Gbit USB adapter costs lie $10, you might also need a cable, a switch, maybe (some) PSUs, a power strip, maybe some box to put everything into… And now you suddenly are spending $400-800 on this project just to get a rather lame cluster. Those cores are rater slow, 2GB of RAM is not that much, and 8GB of storage means you also need some kind of NAS.

    If you like the project go for it but do not expect this to be a wise way to spend your time and money. 3-4 NUCs are likely less expensive and much more fun.



  • I would not really worry about this. You can wear out an SSD but it this is an issue a normal user pretty much never encounters.

    Consumer SSDs are a thing for over a decade now and I often check how much actual people use their drives as this is logged over SMART. Even rather dedicated users need about 1 decade to hit the TBW rating and this is just how much the manufacturer guarantees the drive can endure. In reality, you can expect at least 2x as much, even reports of 10x as much are nothing unheard of.

    It is far, far more likely you will lose, damage, replace it with something faster or bigger long beforehand. Unless you use it eg for a high end camera to record on a daily basis.