Automation.
I just spent about an hour setting up a NAS, or Network Storage Device, on our home network. I’ve needed something to store backups of our photo albums, because I am convinced some day iCloud is going to fail and we are going to lose all of our memories, like we did with MobileMe about 15 years ago.
I’m fairly good at completing backups on a regular basis.
We’ve had a Western Digital PR4100 NAS with a capacity of 16TB. I upgraded it to 16GB RAM a couple of years ago; the box is coming up on eight years old and it’s still chugging along like a trooper. In addition to storing a lot of our files, it’s also our media server, running Jellyfin. This is where I rip our CDs and the like.
I’ve had an 8TB single spinny hard drive in a USB enclosure for a while. I had it hooked up to a repurposed 2011 Mac mini running Debian Linux, which has been serving up a lot of things in our household for the past five years. The addition of an external hard drive seemed to slow everything down, so I thought it’d be good to move the hard drive to another machine.
Enter a $55 Raspberry Pi 3B.
The newest addition to the network arrived today. I installed DietPi on a 32GB MicroSD card, booted up the new Raspberry Pi and went through DietPi’s very intuitive setup process. I connected the existing external hard drive, changed ownership of all the files on the drive over to the new account on DietPi, and everything is good to go. I have it wired into our network and I’m already backing up all our photos to the new target device.
While a Raspberry Pi 3B isn’t really retrocomputing, it has been replaced by the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series. It’s not the most powerful computer by any means, but it’s doing what I need it to do. And using this instead of going with a Raspberry Pi 5 saved us about $140.
Another reason for making this switch as I had, at one point, been using my older Alienware gaming desktop as a host for this external drive. It was very fast but I could hear the digital dials counting down the kilowatts on the meter outside.
It’s always good to save money this way as well.
The Raspberry Pi 3 should take much smaller sips of power off the grid, and anything we can do to mitigate this sort of thing is something on the positive side of the equation.
Even when they’re building an AI data center, in the middle of the desert, about 10 miles from here.
Here’s the Raspberry Pi 3 in my mini rack; it’s the top computer in the stack. The other two are both Raspberry Pi 4s, one is running Home Assistant and the other is running Homebridge. The former allows us to do smart home things directly with the devices on the network, the latter allows us to interface devices not designed to work with Apple’s HomeKit with the Home interface on our Apple devices. This usually involves one of us yelling at Siri. I’m slowly moving us away from HomeKit and into the Home Assistant setup.
#pi #raspberry