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Comment by henriks | Hacker News Reader

I've been eyeing a NanoPi M4 [1] with a "SATA HAT" [2] for replacing my ageing QNAP NAS. It should have similar specs as the OP, with the added advantage of a 4-port SATA controller sitting directly on a PCIe bus.

[1] https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

[2] https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

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I tried searching the blog post or this thread for use cases, but didn't find even a mention; it seems that people use these NATs with something like 4 to 16 TB capacities at home; but I can't imagine a non-professional reason to store so much data.

Personally, if I wanted to store valuable stuff locally, like photos, I'm guessing 250gb of space would be enough for a lifetime.

So what do people use these huge personal storage systems for?

I have 96TB at home, though that's much more than I'm currently using.

I store the usual music (298GB), movies (3.2T) and TV shows (3.5T) which I think is what most normal people would do.

Where the less normal storage comes in is my own photos (5.2T) and videos (2.6T), an archive of all my "rewards" from Patreon (765G), an archive of English manga translations (5.8T), an archive of anime/manga fanart (7.2T) and a bunch of home security camera footage (2.2T).

In total I'm currently at 42T used but I see that increasing, hence the 96T of available disk.

You can find a lot of people doing archiving YouTube videos, educational content, porn, games, pretty much anything really on Reddit's /r/DataHoarder. Pretty much nobody is a professional.

640k should be enough for anyone?

I need more than 250GB just to download and install all the games I've bought on Steam at the same time.

VMs will eat up that space like nobody's business. Especially if you like to keep specific versions of OSes for various reasons (exploit development, home lab environments, etc.).

My iCloud photo library is 250gb and I don't post anything on social media or take a particularly large number of photos.

Also a new game install plus dlc can be 50-100gb.

So the are valid reasons. But also Plex.

Video and photos keep getting larger and larger.

Especially with the cost of cameras that shoot 4K video coming down. You can get a good camera that shoots 4K video for under $1000, (e.g. BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera), and there are cheap cameras (under $100) that can shoot 4K.

I have about 2.5TB of data, quite a lot of which is movies and TV. I would guess around 0.5TB are personal data such as photographs, important documents, my company records etc.

I have a 5TB capacity NAS, which ought to be OK for the forseeable.

Other folks I know with larger storage requirements tend to be into virtualisation tech/openstack etc.

Probably in large parts movies and TV shows, both ripped from bought discs and acquired from other sources.

>> I'm guessing 250gb of space would be enough for a lifetime.

HA! God no. Not for anyone that shoots RAW at least. I probably shoot 100Gb of photos a year. Plus I’ve got 300gb of music I’m not letting go.

This SBC looks amazing, how have I not discovered it sooner?! My current setup is an old laptop hooked up to a USB hard drive.

My setup, which I need to finish, is an old laptop.

You can get a SATA hard drive adapter for the optical slot on many laptops. So you can put in two 2TB hard drives. My laptop only has USB 2.0, so that's a downside. But you have a built-in UPS (the battery), and my battery is a OEM high-capacity one which still works OK.

So the only new parts are the adapter (< $10 USD) and the SATA 2.5in hard drives. Just be aware of the height restrictions, some internal hard drive cavities on laptops can only take the 7mm or 9.5mm high drives, and not the 15mm drives that can be used on a NUC.

My old laptop is a quad-core AMD (which is OK-ish) and has 8GB of RAM, so it will be running some other stuff as well.

Nice, how much will it end up costing for the spec and accessories you want? I bought a HP microserver a while back and am curious how the cost compares.

How do you power the harddrives? Are there power adapters with sata power connectors?

Yep. The SATA hat takes in 12v, converts it to 5v power for the nanopi and has a molex connector for powering the hdds.

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