I never heard it called the Elvis operator! Thanks!

As others gave said, the solution is a VM but once setup correctly, you won’t notice.

If Windows is your primary computer, install HyperV, the built in VM manager for Windows. Then create a Linux VM for your NAS.

Once setup, you won’t even notice. HyperV auto saves and reloads the VM whenever you reboot. You don’t even need a window open for the VM, it runs in the background until you run the manager to connect to the VM and see it in a window.

If Linux is your primary OS, do the reverse and put Windows in a Linux VM.

Don’t hassle with Proxmox, etc. That’s for running lots of VM’s and toggling between them.

You might want to consider that backups only protect very old data from ransomware.

Ransomware works by getting on a machine and sitting for several months before activating. During that time, your data is encrypted but you don’t know because when you open a file, your computer decrypts it and shows you what you expect to see. So your backups are working but are saving files that will be lost once the ransom ware activates.

The only solution is to frequently manually verify the backup from a known safe computer. Years ago I looked for something to automate this but didn’t find it. (Something like a raspberry pi with no Internet that can only see the PC it’s testing, compares a known file, then touches the file so it gets backed up again.)

Instead of having to do an Operating system setup with a cloud provider, maybe another cloud backup service would work. Something like Backblaze can receive your Google files. Then you can download from Backblaze at your leisure.

https://help.goodsync.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003419711-Backblaze-B2

Or use the filters by date to limit the amount of takeout data that’s created? Then repeat with different filters for the next chunk.

Used servers/workstations are likely more reliable than new consumer.

They were very likely kept temperature controlled, have ECC, and are actually known working instead of something like Asus. If I remember correctly, PC mortality is very high the first 6 months, goes down to near zero for 5 years, then starts going back up.

Replace the SSD/hard drive and you are good. You might not even have to do that. I checked the stats on the SSD that came with my used Lenovo workstation and it had like 20 hours on it.

How small? How many drives? I bought several used Lenovo P330 E2276G for my servers.

The Intel CPU has great low power GPU for video encoding/decoding for video streaming.

The Xeon ECC ram gives long term reliability. It’s important if you leave your PC on 24/7 for years at a time.

Smaller doesn’t need to be more complex. 3.5" drives weren’t more complex than 5.25" drives.

A smaller head means a smaller drive actuator. Less mass and smaller size means it can compensate much quicker in response to vibration detection.

Back when full height 5.25" drives were the norm, you couldn’t pick up your PC while running without causing an error. Those tiny CF card sized drives failed but took extreme abuse compared to big drives.

Ssd for boot but not cost effective for nas. Nor do I trust their longevity.

Smaller stuff has smaller mass and therefore can be more reliable.

There were portable mp3 players with mechanical hard drives that were reliable despite extreme abuse.

I’ve read there is an id pin on Epyc cpus that differentiates them from Ryzen. Der8aur made it work by masking the pin on the socket.

The AsRock says ECC but not verified with Ryzen.

So you end up having to test it yourself like this guy and hope the version hasn’t changed between when he bought the motherboard and now.

https://sunshowers.io/posts/am5-ryzen-7000-ecc-ram/

Could be but finding a motherboard that has verified ECC is tricky. Most say works but not tested/supported so you’re on your own to figure out if ECC fully works.

Plex, Blue Iris, Minecraft mod servers for the kids. I’ll often use the server CPU for video filtering/encoding home videos off of VHS tapes because the nnedi3 filter takes a lot of CPU.

Years ago I lost data on a nas because the ram wasn’t ECC. So I won’t buy/build any PC without ECC unless it’s only going to be used for web browsing/gaming.

This is really nice for home servers. There has been a huge gap for years where the choice was a 16-64 core high watt monstrosity or use a 4 year old server CPU before every server went to high core counts.

8cores with ecc is perfect for my home use.

What shenanigans?

My Helium 7200 drives run cooler and quieter than my old 5400’s.

It was a joke.

Where did you read 1TB? The webpage says it supports up to 2TB but doesn’t say it ships with an SD card.

If I remember correctly, every watt is around $1 a year. So a 100 watt server costs $100 a year every year to run. 12 SAS drives and the server is going to be expensive to keep running.

What’s wrong with it? It’s about as close to assembly as you can get.