Quote:
Originally Posted by Adoby
One "strange" use of old laptops seems to be to use them as NAS boxes. Either just as NAS test benches or as a real NAS with a couple of big USB drives hanging from the USB ports. Just serving files on a network is pretty low-intensive work. Suitable for end-of-life hardware.
|
I don't find that strange at all. It strikes me as a good way to use old hardware you happen to have available, and the machines have enough power to do the job.
Quote:
|
OMV (Open MediaVault, Debian with a web GUI for NAS services) is able to convert a very modest old box into a usable NAS.
|
A quick glance at the website doesn't show show minimum hardware requirements. What qualifies as a modest old box?
Quote:
I prefer to use tiny single board ARM computers, SBCs, as OMV NAS boxes. With huge HDDs. 2GB Odroid HC2s. Store and stream media, backup clients and run IoT stuff. They replaced my venerable 4 bay Synology 411j NAS.
One single Odroid HC2 with a 12 TB HDD was enough to replace the Synology NAS that had 4x4 TB HDDs. And with much better performance.
|
The important thing to me is that hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper, and you now
can do that with a single board ARM based device.
On similar lines, a chap I interacted with elsewhere described upgrading a database server he was responsible for by replacing 16TB of SATA HDs with 16TB of 2TB Samsung SSDs. He got a quantum increase in performance. The box
screamed through DB queries and updates.
The significant thing from my viewpoint was that SSDs had gotten cheap enough he could
afford to do it. Lots of things have not been done historically because they were
possible but simply too expensive. That is increasingly not a factor, and I think we are only seeing the tip of that particular iceberg.
______
Dennis