BombOmOm

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source

As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.

If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.

Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.

For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.

M.2 Enclosure

M.2 Drive to go in it

Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.

There are some decently priced drives available used on eBay and Mercari, but they tend to get snatched up pretty quickly. Official refurbs are probably your best bet if you don’t want new, I know B&H sells official refurbs.

The main issue is people think ‘I spent $200 on this, it still works, I’ll sell it for $150 used’ and don’t bother checking what is actually selling. Both eBay and Mercari have a sold listings filter, which is a great way for both buyers and sellers to figure out what things are actually worth.

Unlikely. The main issue comes with port forwarding, but you are locked out from doing that already. I say go for the triple NAT, put your own router after the ISP’s modem and then you have full control of your LAN.

I personally use an old self-built desktop running linux (TrueNAS and Windows also work). Getting a case with lots of drive bays is inexpensive. And it lets you do pretty much whatever you want with the NAS as it’s a full blown computer. I always found the prices for the purpose built NAS to be shockingly high.

Thisin! Links to a few min overview of a Ryzen based PoE mini-pc.

https://lemmy.world/comment/7886685

Level1Techs just posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW4WyuGKsho

Laptop class CPUs can though. AMD Ryzen chips are useful all the way down to 15w. There is a post in this thread of a mini-PC with one and PoE. Real happy that exists.

I would be interested in this as well. The Pi certainly works and I am running one POE. But the Pi can be very limiting.

If you are converting something, be aware PoE has a power budget of 15w and PoE+ has 30w. Though PoE++ can do 100w, I have not seen many switches with that.

Yeah, for TrueNAS it would be a mirrored ZFS array with said two drives, functionally the same.

Your basic components will be an old desktop you have lying around and two hard drives. Put the two hard drives in RAID 1 (mirroring) set with either a network share and/or FTP access to add/remove stuff from the array. The drives optimally should be the same size, but if they aren’t that is OK, the amount of redundant space available will the the size of the smaller of the two drives.

Depending on what you have lying around this might not cost you anything. However, if you are going to spend money anywhere it should be on the drives themselves. You probably don’t need anything fancy, just a pair of 5400RPM HDDs that are large enough to hold your data, plus some room to grow.

You can use any OS of your choosing as basically everything supports the requirements. Linux, Windows, and TrueNAS come to mind as viable options. You may or may not want a third, tiny, drive just to boot the OS, particularly for Windows, as it can make things easier. I personally use Linux for my basic NAS with SFTP access.

I suppose if you want to tinker with the device remotely the cloud feature might be useful. However, I know I have personally never felt the need to tinker with a UPS. They are a set-it-and-forget-it appliance.

I just put a physical label on each one listing when the battery was last replaced, so I know when it is time to replace with a fresh one.

Edit: Nor do I trust them to keep up to date with security patches for an IoT UPS. Remember, the S in IoT stands for security. Don’t add any IoT devices to your network you don’t need to.

Been using Sabrent Rocket SSDs for awhile. Been reliable and fast. They aren’t the cheapest SSDs, but they perform well and don’t break the bank.

Looks like they are available now. I have never used a Zero 3W, but that price is real nice.

NM, I misread the site. They are not in stock.

I’m currently running a PiHole, haven’t found a use for a potential 2nd Ethernet port. It’s not a router or firewall, both of which have value for two Ethernet ports.

That system is plenty capable, in fact you could drop out the GPU if you don’t have anything that will specifically be using it. It’s just going to draw power when all you need is a video-out port. The qty of RAM is particularly good, will provide plenty of cache for the array and the CPU is strong enough you could enable full-drive encryption and not have it be a bottleneck (assuming that is something you want).

TrueNAS’ boot drive doesn’t need much space or speed, might as well boot from the 250GB SSD and save the NVME SSD for w/e else you want.

For array-type, a RAID 5 (or ZFS equivalent) is going to be your best setup. Will use one drive as parity and the other three for storage. A single drive failure is allowed with no data loss.

One of the things I like about the qnap is it can do tiered storage between the SSDs and the spinning disks, presenting that all as one pool. Do any of the alternatives (TrueNAS, Unraid, etc…) have a similar feature?

While I can’t say much to your primary point, I can confirm TrueNAS supports that feature, though I have personally never used that specific feature.

Yeah, they were great as HTPCs as well. Nice little form factor.

Might also make sense to, if not delete them, mark them as old and move them to a different storage location/server. Would enable them to be put on, say a spinner, or on a lower-powered server with spinners.