I prefer digital books because of the following points:

• There is a book price control in Germany, meaning that you can’t get new physical books cheaper. This does not apply to digital books.
• They take less physical space.
• I can read them everywhere with either my Smartphone that I already have with me at all times or my tablet. I do not have to plan to read a book when I’m on the go.
• I can quickly search for something in a reference book if I have it in digital form. This is not possible with physical books.

Only downside:

• I need to have a device when I want to read a digital book. And this needs to be charged. But this is rarely a problem.

Oh, no. I love bandcamp. I don’t want it to go down the drain. :c

What’s up with bandcamp?

Cube 2: Sauerbraten seems to still be maintained. I haven’t played it for a long time, though.

What software did you use to make this diagram?

For my workstation I’m using a small script that packs and compresses all relevant directories with tar once a week. The resulting file is then copied to a local backup drive and to my NAS. An encrypted version of that file is sent to an offsite VPS.

For my selfhosted services (on Proxmox) I’m using ProxmoxBackupServer.

I’ve purposely build that NAS around two or three years ago. It’s a Gigabyte B360M D3H mainboard, Intel Pentium Gold G5400 and 16GB of the cheapest RAM I could find. An Adaptec 71605 card provides SAS/SATA connections for up to 16 drives and a Mellanox Connect-X3 connects my NAS via 10Gbit/s to my network. The case is an Inter-Tech IPC 4U-4424 . It has 24 hot swap bays. But I would not recommend it because the backplane is terrible. Four or five slots are not working. Sometimes, when I re-insert a drive, it is not detected.

Using cheap RAM bit me in the ass last year as one of the RAM sticks started to fail. I didn’t notice that there is a problem with the RAM at first. Only when I observed that one of my scripts was not working I started to investigate the problem. Turns out that one of the RAM sticks failed. Re-inserting the stick did not resolve the problem so I replaced all sticks with old Crucial RAM I had laying around. Some files that I transfered to the NAS during that time period are corrupt. In the future I won’t use cheap RAM anymore and I’m also currently planning to replace the mainboard and CPU with something that supportes ECC RAM so that I can be notified when on of the sticks starts to fail.

Here are some pics from building the NAS

I like your setup.

Thanks :)

Is your nas on Ext4?

Yes, all HDDs in my NAS are formatted with EXT4. I don’t use RAID because there are mostly static files stored there and the drives are configured to spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity.

MD1200 DAS

How loud are those? I’ve heard that the Dell PowerVault DAS arrays are quite loud.

I believe I could reduce the power consumption by ~50W-60W by replacing the R730 with a modern “consumer” mainboard + CPU. But I need two power supplies (I had some issues a few months ago with my UPS) and iDRAC/IPMI is so convenient that I don’t want to miss it anymore.

I’m also currently searching for something power efficient to replace the Pentium in my NAS. Reason for that are some problems with bad RAM a year ago. ECC RAM would be nice to have, so that I can be notified when a RAM stick goes bad. I currently do not know for how long the old RAM stick was bad and which files may be corrupted because of that (I do not use a checksumming file system such as ZFS or BTRFS on my NAS).

My rack currently consumes about 300W. This includes the following hardware:

• Dell PowerEdge R730 with 128GB RAM, 1x E5-2630 v3 (the second socket is unpopulated), 5x HDD and 4x SSD
• MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+ (8 port 10Gbit/s switch)
• MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+ (24 port 1Gbit/s switch)
• MikroTik RB5009UPr (Router)
• Whitebox NAS with Intel Pentium Gold G5400, 16GB RAM, Adaptec RAID controller in IT mode, 19x HDD and one SSD