10 commodity SSDs through a powered USB hub forming a poor man’s NAS with snapraid + mergerfs

How did you end up with this setup? Did you just already have a bunch of SSDs from over the years? That’d be cool af if you posted a photo of it.

For the NAS, what do you use for storage? Do you have an external drive hooked up via USB or something else?

Thanks for clarifying. If I understand correctly, you’re saying that in terms of energy usage, a thin client + external docking station for HDDs might have a smaller footprint than an ITX build, but at the expense of future upgradeability. On the other hand, an ITX build would likely draw more power than the thin client + external HDDs, but enables me to upgrade individual components down the road. Did I get that right?

I would only consider those thinclients if AI is something you are planning to run.

Do you mean b/c AI would require a beefy host for the thin client to connect to?

Thanks for clarifying that. One last question if you don’t mind – some listings (such as this one) say “no OS,” and “You must reload the unit to gain original factory functionality.” Are they just talking about installing my own OS or does “reloading” mean something else in the context of these thin clients that I’m not aware of?

Gotcha, although I’m in the US, so would something like this DELL WYSE 5070 THIN CLIENT Intel Celeron J4105 1.50GHZ 8GB RAM 64GB SSD No OS ($34 w/ free shipping) be comparable?

Gotcha, the one you linked is sold out, but what about this one?

it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86

Hmm, this is just enough to give me pause. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll have to think on this some more and maybe do a little more research.

What made you want to switch from docker to podman?

Beelink ME Mini

Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?

That’s pretty slick.

What are the HDDs plugged into? Would you mind posting some photos of the back?

Okay, thanks for chiming in. Because I also game on PC, I think I’ll scrap the AI server idea and stick with a desktop workstation that will do both gaming and AI tasks.

ETA good point about being able to remote into the desktop workstation from other devices.

Gotcha, so for AI and gaming (dual purpose), I may as well incorporate both into one rig (a desktop workstation) is what you’re suggesting, right?

Piefeddites

try to sneakily make me register passcodes

Can you expand on this? I’m not sure what this means. Is it like instead of a full fledged password, just a four digit PIN or something? Thanks.

How does one find such retired laptops? As an individual hobbyist in the US, would I just monitor eBay, Craigslist, or Facebook?

No, no limits, we’ll reach for the skyyyy

Noice! I am able to find this very thread through searxng, which seems to behave like an actual search engine with its own search results page, but I couldn’t find it through fedi-search, which seems to be little more than an auto redirect tool.

https://fedi-search.com/

Hmm, this sounds like a really cool idea, but it doesn’t seem to do what I thought it would. For example, I went to https://fedi-search.com/ and searched for “stop internet searching” expecting to find this very thread, but alas, no dice.

Photos, we need photos!