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Re: Homebuilt NAS Advice



On 8/7/2020 9:48 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
	No, I am talking about "Extra space taken, extra power used 24/7".
	An external device just does not use that much power

It can easily end up consuming about as much power as my BananaPi, so it
risks doubling the power consumption.

Oh, for goodness sake! The BPi uses less than 1 ampere at 5V. That is under 5W, or 120 watt-hours per day. In a year, it will use less than 40 KWH. At $0.12 per KWH, that is $5 or less, for full year in operation. The external enclosure will no doubt use more, although if it hosts SSDs, then perhaps not. Is $10 or $15 a year really a large burden for you?

	or take a lot of space.

I suspect my wife would disagree.

The unit in the link I provided is smaller than a 2 liter bottle of soda. If your wife won't let you have that much room, you have bigger problems than a failed drive.

I've had to deal with 2 failed drives over my lifetime so far ;-)

You must be quite young or else not do much computing. Three to 4 drives a month is about average, for me.


The only really valuable data that I produce is code, and when I lose the
last N hours of code I wrote, it takes me much less than N hours to
reproduce it.

That is still N hours. I can't afford to lose N hours. An extra hard drive costs less than 30 minutes of my time.

 And drive failure is but one reason why I sometimes lose code.

Indubitably. I do a great deal more than just write code, but with the exception of the aforementioned Windows system, it has been years since I lost anything for any reason other than my own stupidity.

I've been a sysadmin, and have used RAID then (there wasn't even
a question of using RAID or not).  But different use-cases call for
different choices.

	Without question.

Yes, I agree that RAID can be handy in some contexts.
	No, it is *ESSENTIAL* whenever time and data are important.

Redundancy is essential, yes.  RAID is one way to get redundancy.
Not the only one.

OK, but RAID is the fastest, easiest, and least expensive way of preventing loss due to a drive failure.


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