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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • For a media server speed matters little (5400rpm is plenty), if you’ve only got one drive, warranty is king. Thing is you shouldn’t only have one drive, drives will fail, and warranty doesn’t get your data back, so you plan for it. At the very least, you should look at getting an offline backup as soon as possible, now you don’t care if your drive fails and can get the cheapest ones. Ideally, you also set up a RAID5 (or Unraid, or mergerfs+SnapRAID) on your server, now you just get a replacement drive and rebuild. Remember RAID is not a backup, it doesn’t protect against accidental deletions for example, so you still want the offline backup.

    Also, don’t sleep on manufacturer recertified drives, as long as you have a backup they’re significantly more cost-effective.

    TLDR: set yourself up so that a drive failing is not a problem.





  • I was here to say the same as pezhore, separating storage and compute is almost as important as separating church and state. Muck around, break things, have fun, all the while your data is safe (don’t forget offline backups though). The MS-01 is a fine looking box, but any old NUC / SFF will do for your purposes (modern AMD cpu or a graphics card if you need / want plex transcode).

    Edit to add, old laptops are great compute nodes (maybe moreso from my ex corporate thinkpad laptop bias, but still)…