Probably on older hard drives like that hardware raid won’t slow things down too much. But holy shit do hardware raid controllers suck with faster HDDs/SSDs. Also they obscure smart info from your OS so you need special software to talk to the raid controller to know if your drives are failing.
Otherwise they’re fine. If that’s what ya got that’s what ya got. Rung what ya brung.
So I believe the Pi 4 was the 1st to have an actual ethernet controller and not just having essentially a built in USB to ethernet adapter so bandwidth to your HDDs/ethernet shouldn’t be a problem.
Streaming directly off of the pi should be tolerable. A bit slower than a full fat computer with tons of ram for caching and CPU power to buffer things. But fine. There’s some quirks with usb connected HDDs that makes them a bit slower than they should (still in 2025 UASP isn’t a given somehow) But streaming ultimately doesn’t need that much bandwidth.
What’s going to be unbearable is transcoding. If you’re connecting some shitty ass smart TV that only understands like H264 and your videos are 265 then that has to get converted, and that SUCKS. Plex by default also likes to play videos at a lower bitrate sometimes, which means transcoding.
There’s also other weird quirks to look out for. Like someone else was (I think) doing exactly what you wanted to do, but no matter what the experience was unbearable. Apparently LVM was somehow too much compute for the pi to handle, and as soon as they switched to raw EXT4 they could stream perfectly fine. I don’t remember why this was a problem, but it’s just kind of a reminder of how weak these devices actually are compared to “full” computers.
HBAs are cheap, IPMI isn’t at all needed under normal uses cases, and ECC is way overkill.
For most people a halfway decent PC that isn’t failing is plenty.
For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you’ll want something better.
The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.
Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.
Most modern boards will. Also there’s integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.
There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.
At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.
Really?!? The company that LTT has invested in might also support some problematic people?
And when you see how bad their windows support is it’s a miracle anyone buys this garbage.
It’s a neat concept. But at the moment only Apple has pulled it off well. And that’s only if you stick with Mac OS.
I have a computer at work that has like 10 phones plugged into it. Opening “this PC” part of file explorer freezes it for about 5-10 minutes. It’s a very fun issue when I forget about. Normally I just avoid that screen.
It’s a fun bug.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NMZLZ57R3T7
You can still buy it yourself. It’s only $1.
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Most current Gen. thinkpads have fully upgradable ram. The T4XX/14 series had half soldered ram until a year or two ago. SSDs have basically always been replaceable.
They’re also very easy to work on since it’s only a couple of screws and you have full access to the inside of the machine. Those older thinkpads were nightmares if you had to take the whole mobo out. Even MacBooks were easier.
I have the startech usb kvm. It’s expensive new, but used it can be pretty cheap.
Just because you can type that fast doesn’t mean you should.
Do you even care about the things you’re posting?
Swap would probably destroy that thing. And be unbearably slow.
I agree with the others, a rescue partition type thing is probably the best option.
The case around it does. That’s what I want to replace.
That brings up my following question.
If the thumb sticks are capacitive and they wear smooth over time how do you replace them? Are the capacitive sensors under stick caps? Do you just have to replace the rim only?
1000 horses sounds cooler than 735 electrical pixies a second.
Also usually cheaper components.
ITX boards tend to cost more than bigger boards, you’re limited to one slot, and usually the cases are super limited in size for heatsinks or other stuff.