[conspire] external storage recommendation

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On 9/26/21 06:51, paulz at ieee.org wrote:
> Either way, I need to go shopping for some sort of box with at least 2 
> bays for drives and a power supply and a processor board and drives and 
> maybe Wi-Fi and ...
> 
> Often buying the pieces separately costs more than buying a thing all 
> put together.  In my case, I'm more interested in the Easy Button since 
> I have enough other electronics projects where no ready made box exists.
Recently my HP microserver died. It died because I killed it trying to 
upgrade it's accespoint functionality.

It had an old wifi pci card that didn't support 5GHz, bought another 
newer wifi PCI card hoping to be able to use 802.11ax, the card didn't 
even work with ac. Read something about using different pci slot, tried 
to put the old card back... probably short circuited something or just 
didn't treat the box with enough gentleness considering its age.

It was running a bunch of services (samba, postfix, dovecot, horde, tor, 
hostapd, apt-cache-ng...) inside an lxc container (a bit more isolation 
from the outside, easier to move stuff to another box for disaster 
recovery, easier to unbrick it in case of some software upgrade that 
didn't work...
Next iteration I could consider kvm and get rid of virtualbox on the 
workstation.

It had 4 bays. I didn't use them all. I didn't have a chance to upsize 
storage, but it came handy when I had to replace one of the drives.

When I bought that box HP microservers were reasonably priced.
I think including storage I spent $400.
When my HP server died they were not that reasonably priced.

Branded NAS comes with their software. I want debian.
On one side it's a bit of a waste to have all those things installed and 
integrated so nicely and throw them away, on the other many times they 
relay on proprietary software, their own cloud infrastructure etc... 
they are not meant to run debian even when they run a derivative.

Unbranded NAS, you risk some piece of hardware isn't completely 
compatible with debian, it's hard to find reviews that mention changing 
the OS and to know what's really inside, quality etc...

Some comes with arm CPU, this has some positive side but debian on arm 
is not as painless as debian on x86. It's not too painfull but why 
should I...?

Branded NAS are in the same price range of cheap branded server but 
their form factor limit air circulation, makes maintenance harder, not 
on par power supply...

Branded cheap server ~ 450-500$
1 HD included
8Gb ECC RAM
Well enginered case, server grade power supply
On Site NBD warranty for at least 1 year.
no time to assemble it

DIY (as cheap as you can get)
   case/enclosure 70-120$
   mobo: 100$
   no ECC RAM 8Gb: 50$
   CPU: 60$
   1 HD: 100$

You go for the DIY route just if you want to have fun.
Probably if you want a Zen CPU... because you can't find branded 
Ryzen/Threadripper servers, you've to pick up a Epyc, that's way more 
expensive etc...

I ended up buying a Dell 140T, I was planning to buy a cheaper T40 but I 
was in a hurry, in the middle of the pandemic during lockdown and didn't 
find any.

Turned up to be a good choice even if it was way more expensive than the 
T40 since I was able to get a 5y On site NBD warranty for really few 
bucks more and T140 comes with idrac that made installing debian way 
more comfortable.

Backup solution:
"old" openwrt router and usb3 HD (yeah, they are noticeably faster, 
beware some enclosures don't play well with Linux).

For backup an ARM board could be interesting but once you add power 
supply, enclosure and optionally wifi...
You've to be very careful in picking one since eg eth may be on the usb 
bus, wifi may be tricky etc...
Plus: installing debian on an arm board is not as simple as installing 
openwrt, time to assemble stuff, you're buying a GPU you generally don't 
need so they have to cut costs somewhere else to be on the same price 
range of an openwrt router (but yeah if you don't need wifi... maybe...).

Research time, assemble time, install time...

If I need dozens or I'm making money on them... OK... otherwise I prefer 
hardware that can be easily swapped.

Unless... fun... you want to learn...

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
https://www.webthatworks.it https://www.borgonovo.net