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From: -hh <recscuba_google@huntzinger.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: Anybody Still Here
Date: Wed, 8 May 2024 09:41:17 -0400
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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