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.

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.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Hope someone either adopts that or just goes to the effort to update their apps. Suspect we’ll hear from a dev or two over the next week or two as they monitor the ongoing situation and make decisions about where they want to go moving forward.

It’s promising, but I miss having Apollo (or similar) as my interface for the service. I very rarely used Reddit via a browser so not having that robust app is a loss. We’ll see if any of the app developers that have been impacted by Reddits API changes look to support the platform.

Started using Mastodon this year and it was conveniently at the time Ivory, Ice Cubes and Mona were all in the process of shipping beta or final releases. It made the whole experience much more seamless. Mastodon benefited from 6 months of prior unrest in the Twitter community and Devs were already transitioning when Twitter pulled the rug out under them. I think Lemmy will be a harder transition in that respect.

Keen to see how it develops but.

Edit: also interested to see how the decentralised nature of it all plays out for this sort of service which focuses on communities. For Mastodon it seems fine to follow people on other services where it’s still a 1:1 interaction (I with one account follow someone with presumably one account). I’m sort of curious to see how things will scale and play out when you have a dozen different Lemmy services all with their own “Apple”, “music”, “tech” communities and if that dilutes the conversation or allows it to be broader. Bit concerned things may get spread a bit thin at the conversation level, even accounting for the fact accounts can cross post.