BombOmOm

For the money angle, something like a Digital Ocean droplet would be appropriate here. They are $4/mo and you don’t even need to run the thing all the time, just when you need an app version approved.

You don’t need to give them a premier experience, you aren’t trying to sell them on the features of your app. It just needs to function.

Load in those 20 royalty free songs and let the algorithm suck at picking the next of the 20.

Yes, iOS app approval is a pain in the ass (this is one of the reasons there is so much fuss about app store policies and anti-competitive practices). They do test the app and if it has to connect to a server, they will ask you to provide such for them to test against.

Setup a virtual host that you only turn on when they need to approve a new version. Give it some royalty free music to serve.

For DIY, just about any setup would work fine as long as you put it in a case with lots of bays. Throw 2 or 3 of these in there* and you now have however many ports are on the motherboard (probably 2 or 4) plus 8-12 more ports available via the cards.

*I’m not recommending that specific card, just something that gives you SATA ports on a PCI-E card. Just pay attention to bandwidth bottlenecks on the cards. Here is a table of PCI-E speeds.

Since you are looking to build up to 12 bays, what you can do is buy that 4x 12TB drive set now, transfer everything over to the new system, then add the old 12TB drives into the array one-by-one expanding it to an 8x 12TB array. This ensures no data loss, nor wasted drives.

Edit: Also with 8 drives, consider using RAID 6 instead of RAID 5. It’s almost the same thing, it just has two redundancy drives instead of one. Depending on how full your current RAID is, you may or may not need to start the new array with 5x 12TB drives instead of 4 due to the lower capacity when using RAID 6.

It’s a very old 1080p Sharp TV. I know it does have WiFi which I have not setup, but that certainly doesn’t mean the WiFi is off.

I’ll have to see if there is some way to disable the WiFi completely and re-measure it.

The UPS should have a USB plug in the back. Plug that into your computer and it will read the battery status as if it was a laptop. Then in your OS, set the standard shutdown options when low on battery.

A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed you can run it and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).

The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won’t boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won’t use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.

If you don’t already own one, a Kill-A-Watt is a great tool to have. Tells you how much energy a device is using. Biggest thing I found was my TV had a vampire draw of 15W. Literally draws 15W while off. This got the TV put on a power strip I turn off when I’m not using it.

Now, with all that said, sometimes you just want what you want. And there is nothing wrong with that. My goal here is to make sure you don’t feel you have to pick one option over the other.

If you have a desktop, throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Software (like you mentioned Plex or Jellyfin) does the rest. Even if you only have a laptop, a hard drive in a standard USB enclosure will perform this role just fine.

What are you intending to run on this server?

• If it is just PiHole, you can basically get the weakest computer you can find.

• If you want lots of storage space, you will need to make sure you have a case and motherboard that will accommodate the drives.

• If you are running encryption on those drives as well, you will need a CPU more powerful than what comes in a Pi, but nothing crazy.

• If you are running lots and lots of VMs, you will want lots of RAM. A linux VM will use maybe a few GB each depending on what software each is running internally, a windows vm will use a bit more.

• If you are doing AI workloads, you will need a graphics card.

Make a textfile you sync between your devices. Save the URL, book name, or whatever; each on a new line.

So tags and the option to filter them would be nice!

You can tag them at will. Put “#TagName” next to an entry and later you can ctrl-f “#TagName” (or anything else) in the file. Notepad++, grep, and other tools will even give you a list of everything that matched your search criteria if you want to see all items that match at once.

I like to keep things simple!

All I did for that one was search “Threadripper” and look at the pictures for ones with 4x x16 slots that were not hella expensive. There are technically filters for that, but, I don’t trust people to list their things correctly.

For which chipsets, ect to look for, check out this page. If you click on Learn More next to AM5 for example, it tells you how many PCIe lanes are on each chipset type which can give you some initial search criteria to look for. (That is what made me point out x670E as it has the most lanes, but is not newest gen, so you can find used versions.)

Yeah, adding to your post, Threadripper also has lots of PCIe lanes. Here is one that has 4 x16 slots. And, note, I am not endorsing that specific listing. I did very minimal research on that listing, just using it as an example.

Edit: Marauding_gibberish, if you need/want AM5: x670E motherboards have a good number of PCIe lanes and can be bought used now (x870E are newest gen AM5 with lots of lanes as well, but both pale compared to what you can get with Epyc or Threadripper).

Basically no GPU needs a full PCIe x16 slot to run at full speed. There are motherboards out there which will give you 3 or 4 slots of PCIe x8 electrical (x16 physical). I would look into those.

Edit: If you are willing to buy a board that supports AMD Epyc processors, you can get boards with basically as many PCIe slots as you could ever hope for. But that is almost certainly overkill for this task.

Yeah, going along these lines. There is probably a USB header on the motherboard. These have pretty darn good speeds. You can get an adapter that lets you turn those into a USB-C port and then use a standard USB-C to Ethernet adapter. Something like this or this. No guarantee on either of those specific adapters being good though. Looks like slim pickings for such things and both of those are garbage brands.

If you have a USB-C port on the back of your motherboard, you can get an adapter for that directly.

Also, motherboards generally come with 2.5Gb/s ports now too. Some even have two. Something to consider.

Am I correct in understanding that the card will run at PCIe gen 3 X1 if I do this?

Correct. The situation you described in the original post would result in Gen 3 x1 speeds.

The interface will always default to the fastest standard that both sides can support. If one is gen 2 and the other is gen 4, gen 2 is the highest that can be supported. If one side is x8 and the other is x4, x4 is the highest that can be supported.

What can I do if the card is PCIe gen 2 x8?

If you put a Gen 2 x8 card in a Gen 4 x1 slot, you will get a Gen 2 x1 link.

File a small slit in the end of the slot so the card fits into it, but runs past the back. The card will run at Gen 3 x1 speed, but otherwise work properly.

Many motherboards even come with the end of the PCIe slots open for this exact purpose.

Edit: Gen 3 x1 runs at almost a full GB/s, so a 2.5Gb/s card (notice the change in size of the “B”) should have more than enough bandwidth on Gen 3 x1, even at 2.5Gb/s full duplex.

Yeah, your suggestion is the only thing I could think that would even work, but honestly, it’s probably more trouble than it is worth.

An alternative which doesn’t quite meet the requirements, but will be much lower effort would be to format the drive(s) as exFat, which both Windows and Linux can read without issue. Then put them up as a network share in both OSes.

If you are wanting RAID 1 with those two drives…this won’t work unless you are either using hardware raid (maybe you can set it in your bios?) or if you can find a software raid that both windows and linux use. For RAID, maybe just pick one OS and that will be the one that has the share.

I would also recommend against the SSD caching idea with all this other stuff in the mix, wait till you have a dedicated NAS PC. You are going to pull your hair out otherwise.

OP, do you have an old computer, even an old laptop? A NAS doesn’t require much computing power. You can plug your drives in via a SATA to USB adapter. Then you will have a dedicated NAS box and all these problems get 500x easier.

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source