New Server

So Haruka is getting old.  While she's working just fine right now, sooner or later she will fail.  So it's time to start working on the replacement.

The plan is to create a Raspberry Pi setup with laptop hard drives.

I use Haruka for:

1. Remote playing.
2. Backup our main systems
3. Serve media (music, pictures and video).

Here's the planned BOM:

• 8 Slot Cluster Cloudlet : Stackable Cluster For Raspberry Pi 4B and other Single Board Computers
• Raspberry Pi 3 B+
• 2 Raspberry Pi 4 B+ 2GB
• 3 500 GB 2.5" hard drives
• 2 1 TB 2.5" hard drives
• 5 USB3 to SATA adaptors

Phase 1:
Cannibalize the NAS kit hardware for the "play" system.  I also want to see if I can NFS mount the drive as an experiment.  The only outlay is for the case.

This was very successful.
I loaded log2ram to make the SD card last longer.
I renamed the 'pi' user to mine (and made sure that the user numbers matched).

Phase 2:
I got 1 Pi 4 and the other 2 500 GB hard drives and cables.
The plan was to set up the backup system with disk mirroring.

Not quite successful.  The Pi4 will work just fine with 1 hard drive, but it will fail with 2.  The drives pull too much power.


So the plan changed a little bit.  Add to the BOM:

• 1 Powered USB3 hub

This lets me hook up all hard drives to the one Pi4.  I originally was going to serve the videos from one Pi4 and the backups and music from the other.  I knew that 4 drives was out of the question.

But the with the powered USB hub, the hub can power all the drives.  Now I can hook up all 4 drives to the one Pi4.

So waiting for the USB3 hub to arrive.  Then the project can move forward.