742
it is a point of no return (europe.pub)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
113 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

what internship are you doing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 20 points 2 months ago (9 children)

With this sort of thing, I'm always left wondering what I'm missing in terms of the hardware. Like, I've been collecting bits and bobs of old hardware for years, but it feels like if I want anything more than an absolutely basic raspberry-pi-level server, I need to buy dedicated hardware. For example, I want to put together a nas, especially since I do have a collection of spare, old hard drives, but would want raid for that. Unfortunately, its rare to find a mobo that has more than four sata ports, and all the power supplies I have available to harvest from other systems are either too weak, or are proprietary, meaning I'm halfway to buying a new PC anyway. Is there something I'm missing, or do others just have more disposable income?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 20 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    You can get an PCIe HBA on ebay for $50-60 bucks and will allow you to connect 8 disks to a single system. Look for ones that specifically say they have been flashed to IT mode which will let the host system address the individual drives and enable you to use MDADM for RAID. My "Server" is literally just the old motherboard from my gaming PC with 4x 8TB drives connected to one of those ebay HBAs.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    You dont have 11 leftover/trash computers/laptops/harddrives your family dumped on you? Im 26 and ive been given legitimately 16 different computers from my mom, dad, grandparents, and in-laws

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Where do you think all the aforementioned hard drives came from? Lol. Its just that so many of the other parts are proprietary/old that I can't mix-and-match to make something more useful. For a breif period, I had four separate working desktops, and not one had a standard power supply or mobo. I swear all of that should be made illegal.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    To piggyback off of OR3X's comment, I purchased a LSI 9300-16I for my Plex server which will support 16 data/SAS drives with the 4 way cables. They make a 8I version as well that's cheaper. Power is still something you have to work out though, but that's a single PSU.

    I purchased my unit on eBay for $53 a couple years back. I use unRAID to host everything and would recommend because it's fairly simple to setup, and works very well with mixed disks and parity. I've had 5+ old drives fail over the past few years and never lost any data.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    For a lot of purposes, an old slow system is great. Craigslist (if you're in a country that has it, otherwise use your local equivalent) is a great place to find super cheap old equipment to build server infrastructure from. Thrift shops too, I regularly find old UPSs that just need a new lawnmower battery chucked in to work at my local thrift shop, they charge like $10 for em. Usually found near power strips.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent