Richard

Agreed. The products I have used above, DrivePool, SnapRaid and UnRaid are all software solutions. This was important to me because I was reusing hardware and had a real eclectic mix of drives from 14TB NAS drives to 256GB laptop drives that I wanted to get more life out of.

The only hardware limitation is the parity based apps SnapRaid and UnRaid need your largest drive to be the parity one. Makes sense but in a situation like mine where I had a 14TB drive and the next closes was 8TB, that parity drive wasn’t well utilised. Not a big issue but.

As others have said, you certainly can.

If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.

I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.

While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.

I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.

Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.

It’s definitely worth thinking about your use case and whether a second hand mini-pc of some sort is a better option. Along with the Pi itself many people are probably going to need a new case and quite possibly a power adapter too given the new power profile. An older PC where that’s taken care off, and where you probably have a 120GB SSD included, could be the better option for some people.

I’m struggling to find where I heard about this, but if you post to Twitter (or I guess it’s X now) and tag @Sync, they should get back in touch with you and offer you a bonus 10GB for the positive outreach.

Since I don’t know about where I heard about the offer originally, the next best thing might be my post which Sync responded to as evidence of the bonus. Along with one or two other bonuses which one may have been a referral, I’m at 17GB on the free account which is pretty decent, and certainly not as burdensome as the referral process one has to go through with Dropbox to grow the free tier there.

They’re a great service from the time I’ve spent with it and worth a go.

Primarily Memmy for iOS.

Voyager is nice too though on iOS. Connect on Android is nice also.

Yeah I find some of their monetisation stuff makes me a bit uncomfortable, such as their cypto stuff integrated into the browser and enabled by default. There was other articles that when browsing to certain site, the browser would inject their affiliate links (https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology)

In some respects I actually prefer Google’s approach to monetisation over Brave, although I don’t install that either. Having a browser billing itself as privacy focused while manipulating traffic to insert affiliate links leaves a bad taste and distrust of the company.

I use Safari by default and Firefox as a fallback nowadays. Very rarely need to run a chromium browser.

According to Steam it’s Left4Dead. That said, Steam only began tracking use in 2009. Not only do I expect my Left4Dead hours to be much higher as I played that mainly at launch in 2008, but I also think that game would be a distant second to Counterstrike Source which I played heavily around release while I was in university.

Personally, I still preorder games but look to use retailers with easy cancellations that do not bill until shipment, and have lowest price guarantees. I’ve occasionally saved a decent amount of money by preordering on say Amazon because a game I had an order on momentarily dropped right down in price before being bumped back up, and I payed the lower price. Collectors editions for less than the standard, and the like. In more recent times as an example, I got Far Cry 6 Gold Edition (with season pass) for $79AUD day one where the retail was $149AUD for that edition.

It’s quite predatory, but sometimes the preorder bonuses are alright too.

If it’s looking like a game will suck, or my preorder price isn’t good, then I may cancel approaching the release. I do try and stick to developers or franchises I trust...Nintendo and the like.

I’m ordering physical games here rather than digital. In Australia Day one or week physical sales are often cheaper, and then the games jump back up. In the case of Nintendo published games, they then often stay high for a long time and almost never drop dramatically, so I see no reason not to grab those titles early if I’m confident in the game itself, as I won’t save much or anything waiting.

The Mastodon developers and operators of mastodon.social seem pretty supportive based on what information they have so far, based on their blog post.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

The tone from that so far is that federation would be in the cards for them, assuming Meta implements ActivityPub properly.

Cheers. Seems to be incrementing ok with my posts today, but total seems like it was reset or is incrementing only from the past 24-48 hours of comments, so is short 50 or so.

Servers still performing well since my last post but 5 hours earlier.

My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.

In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.

We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.

I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.

To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.

Minor thing but over night both wefwef and Memmy clients are showing the wrong comment score (karma) against my profile, and given they are showing the same amount I assume it’s related to API fed data. Value was correct yesterday. Easy for me to confirm given I have only 2 dozen posts and the value has dropped to single digits.

Not a biggie, but figured I’d report it in case there was some issue causing that. Might be some optimisation around indexing or something has intentionally or unintentionally impacted that.

Otherwise the service feels much more stable currently. No timeouts today where it’s been very frequent the past few days. Nice job. 👍