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How I misspent the day: built a 4Tb RAID array for about the price of giving your money to Dropbox for a year.
Added bonus: it runs dockerised Home Assistant like a champ, I just need to add a Zigbee radio and it's bye bye Philips Hue hub taking up space in my server room.
And now for my next trick: removing one stick from the RAID array so I can r/w test it to see exactly how badly I got scammed buying 1Tb sticks for less than a hundred quid each.
Yeah, preliminary results are inconclusive but they're definitely smaller than advertised. So let's revise that to a 1Tb RAID array if you buy decent branded USB sticks. Honestly, I'm thinking I'll just replace these with a single 1Tb stick, who needs RAID when you've got btrfs.
This is acting as a secondary Syncthing node so data redundancy exists on the network already, the RAIDing is really just a flex.
Have I told you already how much I love Syncthing?
Have I told you already how much I love Syncthing?
Turns out the Home Assistant thing was a much better idea than the Syncthing node thing. The Zigbee dongle arrived today, here's my baby in the "server room" now next to the Philips Hue hub it's about to retire. (The fake USB drives are on their way back to Amazon.)
I know people will want to know, so: it's a Bitron Video dongle with a Silicon Labs Ember 3587 chipset, (26 GBP on Amazon) and Home Assistant identifies it immediately, no hassle at all except for getting Docker to pick up the serial port, which wasn't much of a hassle either.
I'm sticking a 512Gb USB drive in it later, but I'm waiting for the HAT I ordered with four extra USB ports so I can stick it inside the box for fan cooling, those fake ones ran so hot I couldn't pull them out with my fingers.
Because I'm not concerned with data persistence, only extra redundancy, the plan is to stick a btrfs on the USB drive and extend it to further drives if needed, essentially RAID0 but at the filesystem level. If the drive dies, Syncthing will reconstruct the data from the network.
Now excuse me, I've got to go reset and reconfigure some 30-ish smart light bulbs…
Note the "UPS" I strapped it to, the beauty of a low power ARM device is that it can probably run for much longer off a cheap 20000 mAh USB battery than my desktop could off a real UPS.
