Well, I'm hoarding for the apocalypse, then I will either sell/barter this stuff for boots, beans and bullets, or I will build a mofo attack vehicle. Or maybe not... just in case, you know.
“Does the red object left of the green cube have the same shape as the purple matte thing?”
Anyway, here's a ridiculous thing about my backup PC because I knew you're all hanging on my every word, I got a replacement motherboard (different make) and stuffed it and all the working bits in a new case and plugged it in and - FUCK ME! A few minutes of hesitation, wiggle the video cable and reboot - and it all works perfectly. No OS reinstall, no non-functioning devices, no exclamation marks in device manager*, not even anything odd in event viewer. It's as though the Update Pixie, or Sooty, has sprinkled my new build with oofle-dust and Izzy-Wizzy Lets Get Busy it all just works. Backups are back-upping, Plex is Plexxing.
*well, one, because of shitty Intel AMT which I hope a BIOS update will lose
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
There are quite a few mini-PCs around from companies like Beelink and AcePC. They vary in spec from very low-powered Atoms and Celerons up to i7 with 16GB tbh. Most come with Windows 10 or a flavour of Android. That's fine, but I also wanted to have at least 2TB of disk space accessible over ethernet (Gigabit) with a further 2TB to back up the main disk. Almost none of the barebones or built boxes allow for additional drives. I could probably do it using external drives plugged into a mini-PC but there's a huge difference between transferring files over a Gigabit link and over a Gigabit link plus a USB port. Anyway, it was all starting to look a bit cumbersome for something I want to sit in view.
The little Silverstone case has room for a couple of 2.5" drives with proper mounting points. The STX board has 2 SATA headers and comes with matching connectors, plus it has an M.2 slot for a third (PCIe) drive to boot from. So I can put everything into one box and hang a little Cyrus DAC from a USB port at the back. I can control the lot with an eSYNiC mini keyboard and use the telly as a monitor.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
Talking of gotcha, just made a start at putting the little PC together. The 2.5" drives sit next to each other on the bottom of the case with pre-drilled screw holes and little 'dimples' for positioning. The mobo has risers at each corner that hold it clear above them. There are little riser pin-sets on the mobo with custom clip-on cables taking power and data. They're just 2 cm too short to actually reach the furthest drive :'-(
I'll probably have to bodge something now, maybe with some sticky fixer things to sit the drives at 90 degrees to how they should go.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
Really? I find that I get a pretty steady 65 to 90 MB/s disk to disk, depending on what else is using the network, whereas to a USB drive it may start around the same but after a few seconds when the cache has gone it drops to a pretty poor 5 to 10 MB/s usually less. And that's with USB 3.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
Gotta agree with Smithy. I've got some large USB 3 drives on my server and they get a consistent 80-90 MB/s over my gigabit network. Obviously slower for smaller files. But the bottleneck is usually the read end (card reader, other drive etc) rather than the USB 3 drive. Can't really tell the difference from them being internal drives. I was pleasantly surprised when I first got a proper USB 3 drive, wasn't expecting that speed.