• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 1st, 2025

help-circle
  • One of the main advantages of Optane doesn’t easily show in a benchmark: it doesn’t have to do any cleanup. Normal SSD’s cheat all the time by caching writes in DRAM and an SLC portion of the NAND. Usually that works fine and you won’t notice, but if you keep writing then at some point performance will plummet dramatically. Also, the SSD’s need a breather every now and then to rewrite that cached data to it’s final place, during which time performance is also worse.

    Optane doesn’t need any of that. You can write to it at max speed 24/7 and it’ll just take it and keep going, at ridiculously low latency. Perfect for handling large non-stop data streams, or workloads that need a guaranteed low latency (both for reading and writing). It’s a real shame the concept failed, the tech was fantastic.






  • Built my own server to be completely silent since it lives in my living room. Based on an Intel i3-12100 with some NVMe and 5x SATA SSD’s, and running tons of containers. Does about 18W most of the time and it could have been lower with a different motherboard.

    All the UniFi stuff (gateway, switches, APs) uses just under 50W though, so there’s little sense in spending more money on the server to shave off a few watts.


  • Servers are terrible for homelab use. They’re unwieldy, consume way too much power and as you’ve found they’re very noisy. My vote goes to selling the thing and getting a mini PC, an (old) laptop or building something quiet and frugal yourself. In the last case you might be able to reuse some parts you already have. But if cost is important almost nothing beats second hand mini PC’s in value for money.



  • SnapRAID offers an additional benefit over real RAID-like systems: it functions as a short-term backup. If you sync it daily like I do, that means that if you accidentally delete a bunch of files (old enough to have been synced, I.e. older than one day in my case) you can restore them from the SnapRAID parity.

    The reverse is also true of course: if you lose a disk you also lose today’s changes to that data. So it’s most suited to large collections of rarely changing stuff like photos and videos and music IMHO.





  • Yeah only for :latest containers, that’s true. It automatically runs a daily service to check whether there are newer images available. You can turn it off per container if you don’t want it.

    One of the nice things about it is that I have containers running under several different users (for security reasons) so that saves me a lot of effort switching to all these users all the time.




  • I use mergerfs (and snapraid because I do care about my data and want parity) on ext4 formatted disks. This is a much better way to use your disks if you’re mostly just storing media. RAID is for mitigation of downtime after drive failure, not for joining a bunch of (differently sized?) disks into one pool if downtime isn’t really a problem.


  • The point is signaling to other people that it’s not worth their time. I sort by new so I often see these slop posts as well, but other readers very quickly downvote it into oblivion so if a post is older than say 15 minutes I generally will know not to read it even if it sounds interesting at first glance. A mod will come by later to actually delete it if that’s warranted, but until then downvotes suffice.




  • Arch in the front, Debian in the back(end). I run Arch on my laptop and Debian on my homeserver. I’ve ran Debian on laptops before and if stable is getting older hardware support can be a struggle, much better on a rolling distro like Arch. And having all the newest toys on your desktop is very very nice. While on my homeserver I mostly want stability, everything else runs in (podman) containers anyway.

    Cachy is a distro I would consider, because it’ll theoretically give you slightly better battery life due to the optimised compiles, although I’m not sure you’ll ever really notice. Manjaro has a reputation of breaking far more often than Arch does, so that one’s a no for me.