maintaining a Node or a home media server with Raspberry Pi’s is really risky and pain in the ass, you have to worry about the sudden dead of the SSD, sudden offline of the machines, and a sudo apt upgrade will break some dependencies of even several containers. and more importantly you don’t have much better options to backup solutions not mentioning RAID settings on disks etc.
Think I’m finally going to try something with a x86 more powerful CPU, powered with UPS, multi drives with RAID and full disk backup management.
—For Node: Probably UGREEN DXP2800 with 2 HDD slots, for 2TB each as RAID mirror setting, 2 M.2 slots for OS redundancy and Intel N100 CPU with UPS power supply. OS I’m gonna try Start9 instead of currently used Umbrel, not ready for discrete Linux system yet because I’m too retarded and Start9 seems to be better at system level backing up.
—For NAS: DXP4800 with 4 HDD slots, 8TB HDDs are within affordability, that comes to easily 36 TB of storing space. I’ll go with TrueNAS Scale and every upper apps from Docker Containers like my RPi servers is doing on OpenMideaVault.
This is not an educational note, just a summary of my latest research, I’ll start doing it anyway.
Some more considerations taken into at the same time:
— Noise generated at my living room. It’s near bedroom I doubt whether wife will allow that since a RPi4 + RPi5 with all SSDs are already reaching a complaint level.
— CPU. Should I reserve some stronger computing power for locally deployed LLM, make it useful for home picture sorting like Google Photos.
— Access outside of home LAN. The home NAS will be a not ignorable investment, if I’m gonna make the best of it, it’s better for the whole family, and the risk and convenience of family member access, I doubt it so far, but let’s see.
Cost estimation:
- UGREEN DXP2800 = 2,000 CN¥ (290 US$)
- UGREEN DXP4800 16GB = 3,000 CNY (430US$)
- UGREEN UPS *2 = 720 CNY (102 US$)
- WD Red Plus NAS HDD 8TB *4 =8800 CNY (1260 US$)
- 2TB SSD *2 = 450 US$
- 1TB SSD, CAT7 Ethernet cables, and random stuff = 100US$
summed up = 1,200 US$