Nice! syncthing look pretty great when i played with it. my new raid replaced a jbod and box of salvaged laptop disks as it’s archive. got 6 people using my plex server and telling them downtime would be far less frequent was a nice distraction in the group text from “also i’m movin to jellyfin this summer”.
thats fair, it is a wait and see kinda gamble. all my working drives including replacements had about 2.5yrs run on them. the bad batch was all 3.5 yr range. one never powered on, the others dropped within 24 hours. that extra year age could be less the cause itself, as likely they were pulled from the same datacenter and the issue with the drives was more how they were treated at that datacenter.
usecase matters too. this raid with used drives is my media server and uptime was a factor. my nextcloud is a pair of new 8tb drives plus an rsync to a backup. which i could afford to do by going used where i can. (and before my selfhosting friends here boo nextcloud, its the only web ui my elderly parents could use on their own. so calm down ya clowns)
awesome write up!
Just did a raid 10 off cheap 12tb datacenter drives myself. sure i had to return 3 to get a working set plus a spare. but thats why you take the time to check them. ALWAYS test your used drives. the resellers churn through batches of these things in the hundreds. sometimes you get lucky and they all work, sometimes half your order just got pulled from a bad batch and you spend a half hour getting them exchanged.
If you just want a server with a very small footprint and good specs there are far better options. If you like using macOS and will occaionally use it like a desktop while also having some hosted services running in VM full time. Then yeah the minis are great little systems and fairly indestructable. If i went back to daily driving macOS outside work, i’d just buy a mini. But i’d only pay out for a mini if i’m actually gonna use macOS.
jellyfin means you can skip plex, its the same thing. let me see if i can anger some fellow olds. jellyfin is the opensource community giving plex the middle finger it deserves. plex having forked from xbmc an eon ago to be the mac version of xbmc, but then it became a company. i paid for a lifetime plex membership like 10 yrs ago, so i’ve just been lazy about switching.