Bizarroland

If you look around and are informed then you can easily purchase drives that are designed for Nas use. I shucked three eight terabyte Western digital external hard drives and they were all WD reds, but because of the deal they were running they were $60 a piece cheaper inside of the shell than they were outside of the shell.

It’s called shucking and it happens a lot especially in the home server home lab community.

Probably bandwidth. You download a game or five and then you’re good for a few weeks, whereas if you are streaming media you could run through several gigabytes a day of data per customer in perpetuity.

Obviously, with streaming media there is a continuously refreshing pool of money to cover those costs as compared to games being a one-time purchase, but even with that it would still take quite a while to expend the entire revenue of the purchased game in download expenses and storage overhead.

I’m in a similar boat, maybe a few steps further down the line than you but not that far.

Something that is really fun is getting a dynamic DNS set up with duckdns, and then put a certificate on it from certbot and then give all of your containers and self-hosted servers am SSL certificate and name using nginx reverse proxy.

If you do that and your Wi-Fi router has a VPN option then you can easily get rid of all of the certificate errors on your locally hosted stuff and navigate directly to them with a name rather than typing in IP addresses.

For me this was daunting but once I actually got it up and running it all made sense.

At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.

Mine is roughly 300 watts, much of which is from using an old computer as a NAS separate from my server server.

However, I put the whole thing in the basement next to my heat pump water heater which sucks the heat out of the air and puts it into my water, so I am ameliorating the expense by at least recapturing some of the *waste heat.

Since we are talking about cheap ssds, what do you guys think of netac?

Proof?

I read 15 different sites about DNS and not a one of them claimed anything like this. They universally all stated that your network attached devices would use the 1st one unless it didn’t respond and only use the 2nd one if the 1st one did not.

So once again, I ask “Can you send me some more information on this” and not just claim it without any backup information?

I apologize if I am coming off rude, just my BS meter is getting close to the red zone and I would really appreciate some reliable evidence.

Yeah, looks like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

The second ipv4 DNS address is for redundancy and every network connected system will use the first one as long as it responds.

It’s perfectly fine to have a single pihole and use something like quad9 as a failover in the unlikely event that your pihole goes down unexpectedly.

Can you send me some more information on this because this is the first I’ve ever heard that it would not automatically pick the fastest closest and most responsive DNS system available.

No remote DNS server will ever be as fast as one that is local

If you’re router has a failover DNS option, usually listed as DNS 2, I would set something like quad 9 as your backup DNS. Address is 9.9.9.9.

If you don’t want to do that, then having a second instance of pihole running as the secondary DNS is pretty much your only good option

I have 4 home servers. 1 running pfsense, 1 running truenas, 1 running proxmox, and 1 is a cloud key gen2 for unifi that I got for free

Elitedesk 800 g4s can be picked up for ~$130 or so depending on where you look

Very much this. The allure of raspberry pis was that they were $30 toys that could actually be used to do things that were equivalent to much more expensive computers and computer control systems.

Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, probably when supply chain issues drove their prices sky high along with the compute modules being used for home lab servers, and now cheap knockoffs based off of Rockville chips or ESP32 are just as capable as raspberry pis for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time actual desktop computers in miniature form factor have become so cheap on the second hand market that they are incredibly competitive with the raspberry pi.

Don’t get me wrong, pi is a great platform. But the use cases in which it leads the pack have become incredibly narrow.

Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.

Even the pi5 with the nvme hat is not currently price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor as far as I know.

I’ve heard good things about the netac n7000, (not the n7000t!), but I have not bit the bullet yet on buying one