The art of the bodge: I'm running a long SMART self-test overnight on a hard drive and to prevent it from going to sleep I whipped up a bash while loop that periodically checks smartctl to see if the test is still in progress and if yes then it reads a single block from the disk with dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null count=1 to keep it active
I'm in awe at this hard drive that I bought and then promptly dropped while it was spinning; that was over 3 years ago and it's still whirring away fine, no sign of read errors. It's a BarraCuda 2TB. Still, I haven't used it for any important data
So... I love btrfs but first impressions of doing RAID 1 with btrfs haven't been too positive. After you add a second disk to a filesystem, the only useful identifier the whole filesystem has appears to be its UUID — which is the exact same on both partitions of the array. And when the array gets mounted, as far as the system is concerned, "on paper" only one of the disks is mounted. Which one? The one that was lucky to get assigned /dev/disk/by-uuid/$UUID.
Enter me, wanting to replace one of the disks. You might already be seeing where this story is going. So there's sda1 & sdb1. I proceeded running btrfs replace $sdb1 $sdc1 $mntpoint. After it succeeded, the array suddenly got unmounted. The reason was probably that the now UUID-less sdb1 was the one mounted "on paper" and after it was replaced the UUID no longer pointed to it.
I caved and ordered the smol second-hand Intel Celeron SBC box. The case doubles as passive cooling! Allegedly the whole thing idles at just 5W, I'll have to see if that's true
But seriously, most people are so focused on CPU speed when power efficiency has improved just as much, to the point where in a modern Celeron chip you can have the performance of a CPU from 15 years ago but for one tenth the power usage! All this with x86!
With Intel seemingly focusing on this aspect currently, I for one am more excited about future low-end chips than high-end. Oh, and about x86S!
——— Update: so anyway, two months later I now have an Intel N100
@odoben there are also chinese motherboards based around n100 with 6 sata ports (and some even with 4 ethernet ports for some reason), i have one from topton for 150€
@odoben it's also ITX which is also a detriment because the board is so packed, the PCIex1 slot has no space for any card without a riser lol oh and mine has 2 nvme slots
@jeder I'm looking at the various N100 boards (green, other green, black, purple) and most reviews say they don't support PWM. The one I'm considering is the purple board, for which I've seen one review claim it supports it and another that says it doesn't.
@odoben i don't use it for anything yet and tbh i don't know if i will lmao i haven't seen that first one because i'd probably get it instead of this because 10gbit would be more interesting for me instead of having 4 ethernet ports and a pcie slot that is blocked by sata cables anyway
@jeder Hmm... I'm pretty sure all of my existing stuff can only do 1Gbps And 2.5Gbps sounds nice enough since that's already more than HDD read/write speeds so it should be enough for video editing from the NAS. On the other hand I don't need 4 ethernet ports either so I'm not sure which is more suitable. Maybe the one with the PCIe, just for future proofing?
@odoben i mean this is pcie 3.0 x1, you can't really do much with it, and definitely not 10gbps i guess you could put something like SAS HBA card in there but idk
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