What do you consider a fair amount? My current server has 64GB of ram but arc_summary says ZFS is only using 6.35GB on a system with three ZFS pools totaling over 105TB of storage under pretty much constant usage.
Shdwdrgn
joined 1 year ago
Seriously? How can any device call themselves current gen and not support something as basic as this? That's just embarrassing.
Yikes. I get free IPv6 for my servers through Hurricane Electric since my ISP doesn't provide it yet, I wonder if their service also works on AWS? I mean come on, if someone like Comcast can figure it out, why is it so hard for a major player like Amazon?
All it takes is one big company like Amazon changing their services to IPv6-only and most of the world would be converted over in a month or two... but now I guess we know the reason WHY Amazon doesn't push such a policy.
No matter how you go about it, getting these drives set up to be reliable isn't going to be cheap. If you want to run without an enclosure, at the very least (and assuming you are running Linux) you are going to want something like LSI SAS cards with external ports, preferably a 4-port card (around $50-$100, each port will run four drives) that you can flash into IT mode. You will need matching splitter cables (3x $25 each). And most importantly you need a VERY solid power supply, preferably something with redundancy (probably $100 or more). These prices are based on used hardware from ebay, except for the cables, and you'll have to do some considerable research to learn how to flash the SAS cards, and which ones can be flashed.
Of course this is very bare-bones, you won't have a case to mount the drives in, and splitter cables from the power supply can be finicky, but with time and experience it can be made to work very well. My current NAS is capable of handling up to 32 external and 8 internal drives and I'm using 3D-printed drive cages with some cheap SATA2 backplanes to finally get a rock-solid setup. It takes a lot of work and experience to do things cheaply.
The core of Ubuntu is built on Debian, but the maintainers create a lot of their own packages based on the latest versions of software available. So for example both distributions have a version of Python available, but the one in Ubuntu might be the very latest release while the one in Debian may be several months old because it goes through more testing. I like to compare their usage to the difference between using Ubuntu for a desktop computer (where it's not the end of the world if something breaks) to using Debian for a server (where you absolutely need rock-solid services that will never fail you). And of course Ubuntu and Debian are not your only choices, there are even other distributions which are based on Debian or Ubuntu, several distributions based on Redhat, and plenty of others which are completely built in other ways. If you really want to learn the nuts and bolts of it, check into the Linux-from-scratch project which walks you through building your own system completely from compiled source code.
Now the desktop environment is a whole different thing, and Linux gives you a lot of choices there too, from very lightweight desktops that could run on a twenty year old computer to much heavier desktops with a ton on features which require more modern hardware. The nice thing about desktop environments is you're not stuck with just one. You can actually load up several and choose which one to load when you log in to the desktop, then later on dump the ones you don't like. So the important thing is finding a base OS you like first, then everything on top of that can be changed as you learn more about Linux.
Something thing to keep in mind when getting started is to manage your expectations. You've spent all this time using Windows so you already know where everything is -- for Windows. In a lot of respects you are going to be starting over from scratch, learning new ways to install software, get around the desktop, and doing simple things like changing your settings. Don't get discouraged, you've done this before, you can do it again.
One way to cope with the initial frustration is to start out loading up something like VirtualBox on your Windows desktop, and installing a linux distribution there. Then you can play around, take your time to find a desktop that's right for you, and learn how to actually DO things in linux that you already do daily in Windows. That way you eliminate the pressure of trying to figure out how to do everything at once.
Another reason to start with a virtual machine is that there are a LOT of possible linux distributions to choose from. There are also quite a number of different desktop environments to choose from. It pays to take a bit of time and play around with different options to find out what you like. You also need to decide if you want something running the cutting-edge releases, or if you prefer stability with slightly older software. For example, Ubuntu is a good choice for the absolute latest releases but can introduce bugs that the devs refuse to fix. On the other hand, Debian (which is actually the base system that Ubuntu is built on) only releases slightly older software that has been tested over the past few months. However in all cases, you will always get immediate patches for security issues.
As already mentioned, any old computer laying around is a viable candidate for Linux. Until last year I was running internet-facing web servers on 1GB of memory and a single core. If you have something built in the last 20 years it will work for your purposes. Hell my desktop is someone else's throw-away because under Windows they considered it "too slow to get email or browse the internet". I use it for writing arduino code and building models for my 3D printer.
Haha and now you know exactly WHY they do that! The manufacturers were more than happy to let people keep believing SATA3 drives would be faster than SATA2 drives until they started facing public backlash and the costs of returns, but they still try to bury it in the fine print.
Keep in mind that any transfer speeds on the box are also going to be best-case scenarios, for read access only (because writing takes longer than reading even on an SSD). The numbers I found on reviews are generally going to be more real-world conditions including a combination of simultaneous read/write operations. Personally I don't trust anything except what I can get in my own installations because everyone's hardware and software are different, but if you decide to do your own testing make sure that it disables cached operations during the tests or you're not doing anything but checking the speed of your RAM.
As I mentioned in my previous post below, even in theory a spinning platter is not going to reach anywhere near 5Gb/s speeds, not even 1/20th of that. You can google the specs as easily as I can, but a 4TB WD Blue drive is only 5400rpm which seriously hampers its speed, limiting it to about 175MB/s (bytes, not bits).
The 4TB Seagate Ironwolf is another slow drive at only 5900rpm, but does manage to creep up to about 190MB/s transfer speeds.
You didn't mention which one is your 4TB drive, but the speed of the slowest drive is going to dictate your top transfer speeds. No matter how you slice it, you can expect a long wait to transfer 4TB of data. If you want more speed, you can get better performing 7200rpm drives, but you won't see any substantial increases until you move into a multi-drive RAID. I would recommend a minimum of 5 drives, but for comparison I have eight 18TB drives set up through ZFS as a raidZ2 configuration (similar to RAID6) which gives me a sustained transfer rate of around 450MB/s. If you need faster, you really have no choice but to upgrade to SSD.
Just an opinion, but if they were forced to use open standards between products then it would still be easy to tightly integrate features between the various "companies". The problem is this would also allow everyone else to play alongside them, meaning Apple would no longer have a monopoly on such things, and the open standards might even gasp be used by other operating systems. But what do I know about Apple products, they may already be using open standards?
Ugh... still? I knew the mail app had shitty support for it and had to create an IPv4-only dns entry for my mail server, I didn't realize the whole system was broken. Ah well, despite being an android user myself I would still place it in the bucket of "not modern" because there's really no excuse for something like this.