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by dsr_ 1969 days ago
As a household backup device, rather than a NAS, this is actually pretty good.

Use mdadm RAID-10 across four spinning disks, or RAID-1 across a pair and have two slots free. If the board fails, you can plug them into any other Linux box with SATA ports available.

Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway. One expects a backup or restore to take a while, but also not to be interactive.

It's probably cheaper to repurpose an old desktop, but this will probably use less power, even when both are asleep.
2 comments
IgorPartola 1969 days ago
ECC and zfs/btrfs I think are a must for any data you care about. RAID 1 isn’t going to save you when you can’t tell which copy of the given block is the corrupted one.
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dsr_ 1969 days ago
It completely depends on what your specific circumstances are, and something is always better than nothing.

(Also, you aren't getting ECC RAM at this price point, no matter what.)

What's a good use case for this? A house with a few laptops, a desktop and one server. Everything uses the server as their datastore. The server runs ZFS, but even ZFS can run out of luck, so you send over a snapshot to the backup device every day or three. It's insurance.

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znpy 1969 days ago
> Most people have no better than 1Gb/s ethernet available in their house anyway

This is partially true. Most people have no better than 1Gb/sec per single computer. That means that a single pc using the full 1Gb/sec would saturate the nas network I/O and degrade performances for all other clients.

Which may or may not be okay... You just know to be aware of that.

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dsr_ 1969 days ago
I keep saying backup, and other people keep re-saying NAS. These are different.

A NAS can serve as a backup.

Not all backups are suitable as a NAS.

Now, let me restate: Most people have no networks capable of significantly more than 1Gb/s between two hosts in their house. Complaining that a backup server is also attached at 1Gb/s is not going to cause people to discover that they have already purchased 10Gb/s switches, or LACP switches, or even acquire 2.5Gb/s switches.

Of the people who have 10Gb/s switches in their house, approximately none of them are going to look at this very low cost, low performance, low power system and say "yes! this is my new primary backup system!"

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toast0 1969 days ago
LACP switches aren't too bad. I picked up a pair of 16-port switches with vlan and LACP (1-4 ports) via web interface for around $100 combined.

2.5G or 10G switching is still too expensive for me.

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