The seller mentions the drives are fully tested, but does not offer a warranty, aside from the Ebay 30-day return policy.

I left a comment to the Ebay seller and asked the same question, but I did not get a reply.

Ah yes ! I just fixed that. Thanks.

What do you use for the bit-by-bit test and how long does it take (depending on disk size) ? I have read about badblocks and that it could take an entire week to test one drive of 12TB, I didn’t have the patient to do that. The long SMART test already took nearly 20 hours in my case.

Thank you

Thank you ! It was a cool design project, but I ended up no publishing the design as it is quite difficult to assemble and work with. here are a couple more photos:

The black box with white front and blue LED lights, yes. I designed and built it myself. The case is made of laser-cuted plexiglass and 3D printed parts. The front plate is PLA, internals are PETG. It’s build around an ARM Single-Board Computer: NanoPi M4V2 with a SATA extension hat.

In a previous post, some were recommending me to use helium-sealed drives for lower noise. The disks I’ve bought are helium-sealed, but they are definitely a little louder at 7200rpm than 5400rpm drives. It’s still acceptable.

I love jellyfin, it’s great ! I haven’t played with Plex much to be honest, so I can’t really compare

My media collection is not backed-up, expect for the spare disks I have now. My photos and documents are encrypted weekly and sent to pCloud. They are also synchronized to my computer and phone with Syncthing. This way the important files are protected by 3-2-1.

why not btrfs send | btrfs receive? is there some advantage to rsync?

I didn’t think of this. I am familiar with rsync, I went with it without searching for alternatives.

did you hotswap the drives after each btrfs replace or shutdown and then swap?

I did the swap with the system powered down. I don’t know if my the NanoPi + SATA hat support hotswap.

what’s your host OS and do the drives spin down if inactive?

The NAS runs Armbian. The disks are configured to spin down, yes. I don’t know if this caused me the issue while replacing disk 2. I suppose not, since during replace the disks are all reading continuously. But I don’t know for sure.

Edit: fixed copy-past mistake with quoted sentences

I guess I got lucky with this batch, they all seem to work perfectly. But only time will tell if this what truly a good deal.

The client for Android TV works very nicely. Maybe there is a way to use the same UI on consoles?

I feel like outdated software on the stable distro like Debian has become less of a problem with the development of flatpak.

Ardour is definitely professional grade, but I must say that it’s far from simple to setup. First, you may not have the latest version available in you SW repository and you would have to compile it yourself! Then, despite all the progress brought by pipewire, audio config in Linux is complicated and unreliable, especially for this time of work, requiring different audio devices, MIDI control interfaces and VSTs.

I am not an audio professional, I’m an amateur, and found myself demotivated by the amount of work required until I am ready to create music, and finally gave up :(

I use Duplicity to backup my home directory, excluding Steam and Downloads folders. It is setup to backup weekly to my NAS mounted as NFS. The NAS has a weekly cron task to upload the backups to pCloud using rclone. I backup this way, several computers (2 desktop, 2 laptop, the NAS as well). The files included in this strategy are essentially my photos, documents and configs. My software installations, games, media library are not backed up.

I self-Host Vaultwarden at home, this way I have a convenient password manager for myself and my SO, it’s easy to setup and maintain. East to access from the phone, Firefox, etc. Bitwarden app keeps a local cache so even when disconnected from the server I have access to my passwords and it will synchronize at the next connections. I otherwise have a Wireguard VPN setup in case I need to connect to my home server from outside my home.

Before I used KeePass+syncthing but it was to much configuration to convince my SO to use it. Bitwarden/Vaultwarden was more successful in that regard.

Thanks for the advice. I found that the import tax would be 80~100€. I when for eBay Germany, and ordered some drive there: 4x WD Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB, helium-sealed, for 120€ each. I will test them upon receiving and see how it goes from there :)

I am checking now, they do deliver to my play, it cost ~40€ for shipping, but they mention this does not include import/duty taxes and I have no idea how much this would cost.

I am checking it out now, they have great deals, even after accounting for the ~40€ shipping, but I am wondering if I will have to pay additional import taxes/duty, not sure how much this would be.