On 01/10/2021 17:08, Mark Knecht wrote:
This old machine is now about 10 years old. It's a big Cooler Master case, 6 or 8 removable drive bays, heavy. It collects dust and sometimes the fans are quite noisy. If I was going this direction I think I'd have to tear the whole thing down, redo the case fans at least. If I did all that then I think I'd use it for the new machine, but you do have a point.
Okay, get your new disk drive, stick it in your old server, put btrfs on it, learn to play with the backups etc. You can hoover out the inside at the same time, and possibly replace the fans - they might be noisy because the bearings are shot.
There's no reason why your backup drive has to be in a different machine (other than the physical safety of it being separate), so play with it as part of your current machine. Learn btrfs, learn rsync, learn all that stuff.
(Your case sounds a bit like the N300 I've just bought. I want to put a whole load of 1TB drives in it as a raid testbed - you might have noticed my name on the raid wiki :-)
The other thing, if you are interested and happy with just one disk not raid, look at getting one of these HOST MANAGED shingled drives, and use a log-structured file system. Again, I don't know anything about these other than what they are, but for backups it should be a good and reasonably cheap solution.
If you want to go down the pi route, I think you can get little cases, and I've got a USB thingy into which you can plug two drives. But at about £30-40 each, that's $100 for hardware over and above your drive. I'd recycle the old machine :-)
Cheers, Wol
