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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I prefer digital books because of the following points:

    • There is a book price control in Germany, meaning that you can’t get new physical books cheaper. This does not apply to digital books.
    • They take less physical space.
    • I can read them everywhere with either my Smartphone that I already have with me at all times or my tablet. I do not have to plan to read a book when I’m on the go.
    • I can quickly search for something in a reference book if I have it in digital form. This is not possible with physical books.

    Only downside:

    • I need to have a device when I want to read a digital book. And this needs to be charged. But this is rarely a problem.









  • I’ve purposely build that NAS around two or three years ago. It’s a Gigabyte B360M D3H mainboard, Intel Pentium Gold G5400 and 16GB of the cheapest RAM I could find. An Adaptec 71605 card provides SAS/SATA connections for up to 16 drives and a Mellanox Connect-X3 connects my NAS via 10Gbit/s to my network. The case is an Inter-Tech IPC 4U-4424 . It has 24 hot swap bays. But I would not recommend it because the backplane is terrible. Four or five slots are not working. Sometimes, when I re-insert a drive, it is not detected.

    Using cheap RAM bit me in the ass last year as one of the RAM sticks started to fail. I didn’t notice that there is a problem with the RAM at first. Only when I observed that one of my scripts was not working I started to investigate the problem. Turns out that one of the RAM sticks failed. Re-inserting the stick did not resolve the problem so I replaced all sticks with old Crucial RAM I had laying around. Some files that I transfered to the NAS during that time period are corrupt. In the future I won’t use cheap RAM anymore and I’m also currently planning to replace the mainboard and CPU with something that supportes ECC RAM so that I can be notified when on of the sticks starts to fail.

    Here are some pics from building the NAS


  • I believe I could reduce the power consumption by ~50W-60W by replacing the R730 with a modern “consumer” mainboard + CPU. But I need two power supplies (I had some issues a few months ago with my UPS) and iDRAC/IPMI is so convenient that I don’t want to miss it anymore.

    I’m also currently searching for something power efficient to replace the Pentium in my NAS. Reason for that are some problems with bad RAM a year ago. ECC RAM would be nice to have, so that I can be notified when a RAM stick goes bad. I currently do not know for how long the old RAM stick was bad and which files may be corrupted because of that (I do not use a checksumming file system such as ZFS or BTRFS on my NAS).


  • My rack currently consumes about 300W. This includes the following hardware:

    • Dell PowerEdge R730 with 128GB RAM, 1x E5-2630 v3 (the second socket is unpopulated), 5x HDD and 4x SSD
    • MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+ (8 port 10Gbit/s switch)
    • MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+ (24 port 1Gbit/s switch)
    • MikroTik RB5009UPr (Router)
    • Whitebox NAS with Intel Pentium Gold G5400, 16GB RAM, Adaptec RAID controller in IT mode, 19x HDD and one SSD