Re: Homebuilt NAS Advice

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> - RAID would require extra hardware in my machines, for some of them
>>    that would be a non-trivial constraint (e.g. my BananaPi servers and
>>    my laptops).
> 	How do you figure?  Adding an external USB drive enclosure to
> 	a laptop or a Banana Pi is pretty trivial.

Are you seriously suggesting a RAID setup where one half is the
SATA-connected drive inside the laptop and the other is an external
USB-connected drive?

Sounds like a recipe for a world of pain for all the times that the
external drive gets disconnected (not to mention the performance impact
of having one half going over the slow USB2 connection, defeating the
benefits of the internal SSD).

For the BananaPi, the suggestion is marginally less problematic but
still: a non-trivial constraint with significant immediate downsides.

RAID is basically an insurance.  Taking an insurance makes a lot of
sense when it's important to spread the cost of the impact of an
"event", but in my case the cost of such an event would be fairly low
anyway (not to mention that RAID doesn't prevent me from losing work
when the OS or my editor crashes, or when I make a mistake).


        Stefan