Sometime in October 2022 during RetroChallenge 2022/10 I started to tinker with TrueNAS SCALE. I’ve been on the search for more storage for a while now. Well, not more storage, but a way to store my data reliably. I learnt about magical things like ZFS, RAIDZ2, spinning rust, HPE MicroServer Gen8, modern hard drive error rates and more!

Fast-forward to today and I now have a cool mesh and 64 TB of raw drive capacity, with 32 TB of that going towards redundancy rather than file storage. That’s before filesystem overheads. Redundancy isn’t a backup, so I might have an offsite backup or two. And who could forget the ryegrass in my kitchen along with the empty shell of a desiccated cicada (zoom!). That’s a story for another day. With the mesh fitted, the CPU temperature graph below shows a drop towards the end of March. Looking cooler!

The additional storage gives me space to breathe and sort out my data, which is something I haven’t been able to do for a long time. There’s plenty happening, but I’m back on a five-day week and it’s killing me. I think the problem is I can’t see any future where more of the same doesn’t continue. Maybe lizard has it all figured out but can’t communicate it to us. Oh well, at least TrueNAS kicks ass! 🤷‍♀️

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