On 10 Jul 2019 08:37:33 GMT, Bob Eager wrote:

On Wed, 10 Jul 2019 09:35:17 +0100, T i m wrote:

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 05:28:40 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 30/06/2019 21:35, wrote:
On Sunday, 30 June 2019 21:05:34 UTC+1, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
+1. BUT I have found an old mini-tower PC that was essentially given
to me as scrap will take up to 4 SATA drives of terabyte level size,
... ....a pi would cost more!

What about the electricity consumption though?

Well its not huge. About 25W I reckon

I bet it's higher than that, depending on how 'old' the hardware was
(from my practical measurements of such things).

Depending on the age of the SATA drives, they can be up to about 10W each.
Even my relatively modern microservers take about 25W-30W each, plus
disks.

Quite. I had to work quite hard to build my server and keep the power
consumption down.

I did it by carefully choosing an Atom powered ITX board, using 3 x
500GB laptop drives and making it passively cooled (every fan adds
quite a bit).

It also hibernates as soon as the last user logs off (and any torrent
file finishes or the network access drops below a minimum usage or
there is no guest access etc) and the hdd's idle when not being used
etc.

So, whilst not quite as low as say a DS218j, it's much closer than one
of TNP's 'old PC's' is likely to be ... and every little helps (lower
the background level). ;-)

When measuring desktop PC's in general I was horrified just how much
power some of them consumed, even when idle! ;-(

Daughter was saying last night that she wishes she had all her stuff
in one place again (as she used to when she lived here) as she is
often on her phone, laptop or desktop. I would love to give her
something like a 218j but we can't really afford it atm (funeral /
other costs etc).

So I could build her a RPi based unit and it probably wouldn't need to
be massive, so even 1TB (or whatever the deal / sweet spot was for
USB3 portable drives) of storage would probably do, but it really
would need to have 1) some sort of RAID(1) and 2) the content of the
drives would need to be readable in the event of a system hardware
failure (on another box etc).

I'm currently testing a new 32GB uSD card and will install Rasbian on
it. I would then like to install the latest version of OMV and (try
to) configure it for RAID1 (I don't think there are any OMV images for
RPi4 yet).

Performance doesn't really matter (within reason) and as long as the
soft RAID doesn't impact the performance too much, it shouldn't be any
worse (and likely to be much better) than my OMV running on a RPI2B.
;-)

OR, if RAID isn't advised, even on a RPi4, working out how you could
automate the backup of a single shared volume onto an alternative one?
Whilst this wouldn't be a production solution, availability would be
important as stuff generally goes wrong when time is critical or the
data most important. ;-(

Cheers, T i m