Going full circle

Remember the good old days? When you wouldn't just buy an off-the-shelf MacBook, but carefully assembled your computer hardware? Waiting for all the components to arrive, to then sit on the floor and put them all into that huge desktop computer case.

That magical beep when you press the power button. The screen turning on for the first time. Did everything work out? Any errors?

I had quite a flashback to these moments in the last few days. Nowadays, you'd just get a new laptop. Custom components? Assembling it all at home? You can still do that. But why would you? Even a nerd like me just got fully-built laptops over the last few years. I wanted to work, not think about hardware.

Yet, I will be sitting on the floor again next week. Unpacking components. Placing them onto a motherboard. Pressing the power button. Waiting for that beep.

Around a month ago or so, I watched a YouTube video by Linus Tech Tips (quite honestly, I don't remember what it was about). It was the first time I watched their channel (and it opened quite a rabbit hole for me), and they mentioned that they store all their data on an on-site server. All their video material, business documents. Everything.

Why? Why wouldn't you just have it on your computer? Their point was pretty simple: Your daily work machine is your most vulnerable point. Virus? Malware? Hard drive failure? Data loss? Yeah, it's probably going to hit your work machine.

Our daily laptops are built on classic consumer hardware. Personally, I have a MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. It's around two years old, and still holding up pretty well. But I am using it every single day – and not just to browse the web, but to put heavy load on it. Run the entire Magic Pages infrastructure locally. Develop backends, do database migrations, etc.

At some point, this machine will fail. And while Apple is known for products that hold up pretty well over the years, when they fail, it's usually a clusterfuck. You can't replace anything. Well you can. But then it's probably cheaper to just buy a new one. Sustainability who?

So, I decided that I want to offload all my critical data onto external, reliable hardware. First reflex: just upgrade that Google Drive to 2TB. Or any other cloud storage provider.

But, thinking about it, the fact that LTT has their own storage server on-site makes a lot of sense. Local networks – if set up correctly – are incredibly powerful. And it gives me full control over my data. Heck, I could physically take the hard drives and move them anywhere I want. Can't say that about Google Drive.

The idea for a classic network attached storage (NAS) was sparked.

A NAS is basically just a server that has a shit ton of storage attached. You access it through your network (duhh) and can – if you want to – also expose it to the internet. It's like your own mini cloud. Just for a fraction of the running costs of most cloud providers.

First stop on this journey: buy a used NAS device. There are manufacturers like Synology or QNAP that build these systems – and you can just plug them in and they work. But they are also incredibly expensive. So, I went to eBay and bought a used NAS from a company liquidation sale. At the same time, I bought 4x 10TB hard drives to put into this NAS. That should be enough storage for a few years of backup of both my local machine and Magic Pages.

The NAS arrived, I put the drives in…and was disappointed. I thought this was plug and play. And it was. But not for the drives I bought. The NAS I got only supported a total storage volume of up to 16TB. So, I could literally just run a single one of my 10TB drives in it 🙃

I returned the NAS – and decided to use our existing home server (that's currently just running our media library) for a custom NAS build. The enclosure arrived. I put the drives in, plugged it into the server. And was disappointed.

None of the drives turned on. It's like they were dead. But I knew they worked. After all, the NAS I returned recognised all of the drives. It just couldn't use them because of the storage limitations.

A little research revealed, that I bought server-grade hard drives (yeah, that was the idea – they are more expensive, but pretty reliable). And these have a "power disable feature" that just isn't compatible with most hardware enclosures.

Again, I had to return what I got. And ordered a new hardware enclosure. This time, a pretty raw one. No USB connection. Just straight into the SATA ports of the server's motherboard. Nice. (Nice for a nerd like me. Horror for anybody that has never opened a computer).

I had to tinker with hardware. Open up my server, connect new power supplies. Feel like 14 year-old me again, who got his first self-built desktop computer.

But the excitement didn't last long. The enclosure I got was apparently faulty. The hard drives would turn on – so it had power. But the data link would not be established. Quick call with the technical support. And another disappointment: gotta return it. Again.

Ughhh…

Yesterday evening I sat on the sofa, watching some TV with my wife, when I just thought: screw these experiments. Let's go full circle. Back to my childhood bedroom. Assembling components. Beep beep.

So far, I tried to make existing solutions fit my use case.

The media server I had is tiny. Like, really tiny. The only way to get four hard drives into it is by putting an external hard drive enclosure next to it, change the power supply, add more hardware to it, and well…finally give up.

All of these problems could be avoided by a bigger case. One that houses all four hard drives. No more make-shift solutions. But a simple desktop computer that only has one purpose: power those damn hard drives.

I had a pretty powerful CPU (the brain of any computer) in my media server. That's the most expensive part. I have the hard drives. I have the power supply unit. All I really needed was a bigger case, a motherboard, some memory, and some cables.

Half an hour later, I found a pretty reliable and powerful used motherboard on eBay for 30€. Since I don't need a fancy case for a server that's just put in a corner of the office, I snatched a case that was on offer for 25€. Memory is cheap. 16GB for 20€. Add a CPU cooler for another 20€, and some cables and screws for 15€.

All in all, that's 90€.

Next week, when all of these components arrive, I'll have a nerdy childhood moment again. Unpacking components. Assembling them in a case. Pressing that power button. Beep.

Going full circle. Because all I wanted was 40TB of backup storage 🙃