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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m glad you asked because I’ve sort of been meaning to look into that.

    I have 4 8TB drives that have ~64,000 hours (7.3 years) powered on.
    I have 2 10TB drives that have ~51,000 hours (5.8 years) powered on.
    I have 2 8TB drives that have ~16,800 hours (1.9 years) powered on.

    Those 8 drives make up my ZFS pool. Eventually I want to ditch them all and create a new pool with fewer drives. I’m finding that 45TB is overkill, even when storing lots of media. The most data I’ve had is 20TB and it was a bit overwhelming to keep track of it all, even with the *arrs doing the work.

    To rebuild it with 4 x 16TB drives, I’d have half as many drives, reducing power consumption. It’d cost about $1300. With double parity I’d have 27TB usable. That’s the downside to larger drives, having double parity costs more.

    To rebuild it with 2 x 24TB drives, I’d have 1/4 as many drives, reducing power consumption even more. It’d cost about $960. I would only have single parity with that setup, and only 21TB usable.

    Increasing to 3 x 24TB drives, the cost goes to $1437 with the only benefit being double parity. Increasing to 4*24TB gives double parity, 41TB, and costs almost $2k. That would be overkill.

    Eventually I’ll have to decide which road to go down. I think I’d be comfortable with single parity, so 2 very large drives might be might be my next move, since my price per kWh is really high, around $.33.

    Edit: one last option, and a really good one, is to keep the 10TB drives, ditch all of the 8TB drives, and add 2 more 10TB drives. That would only cost $400 and leave me with 4 x 10TB drives. Double parity would give me 17TB. I’ll have to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn’t get full of junk, but I have a pretty good handle on that sort of thing now.







  • Frigate for software. Add a Coral to your computer (they come in M.2, Mini PCIe, even USB) to handle the object detection. Configuration is slightly complex, but the documentation is very good.

    I’m using a couple of Amcrest cameras which I have on a VLAN that can’t access the internet, so no spying from the manufacturer.

    I also added a hard drive specifically for the recording. It stores a ton of days worth of footage and Frigate handles deleting old footage to make room for new. I figure that hard drive will probably fail sooner than my other drives which is why I got one just for that.



  • 9 spinning disks and a couple SSD’s - Right around 190 watts, but that also includes my router and 3 PoE WiFi AP’s. PoE consumption is reported as 20 watts, and the router should use about 10 watts, so I think the server is about 160 watts.

    Electricity here is pretty expensive, about $.33 per kWh, so by my math I’m spending $38/month on this stuff. If I didn’t have lots of digital media it’d be worth it to get a VPS probably. $38/month is still cheaper than Netflix, HBO, and all the other junk I’d have to subscribe to.



  • If I remember correctly, Proxmox recommends running Docker in virtual machines instead of LXC containers. I sort of gave up on LXC containers for what I do, which is run stuff in Docker and use my server as a NAS with ZFS storage.

    LXC containers are unprivileged by default, so the user IDs don’t match the conventional pattern (1000 is the main user, etc.). For a file sharing system this was a pain in the butt, because every file ended up being owned by some crazy user ID. There are ways around it which I did for some time, but moving to virtual machines instead has been super smooth.

    They also don’t recommend running Docker on bare metal (Proxmox is Debian, after all). I don’t know the reasons why, but I tend to agree simply for backups. My VMs get automatically backed up on a schedule, and those backups automatically get sent to Backblaze B2 on a schedule







  • I’m not a lawyer, but since Lemmy instances aren’t “professional or commercial activity”, I doubt a GPDR request would be applicable.

    Some people who run instances might have the ability to do some sort of database export for a specific user, but the vast majority of us are just barely technical enough to keep Lemmy running and updated.

    The last time I touched our database I accidentally wiped out all data older than 1 month and had to restore a backup.

    I think we do have the option to remove a user by purging them through the UI, but an export isn’t an option at this point.