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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

External drives are often designed for a shorter duty cycle and don't dissipate heat as well as they could.

People have been battle testing those cheap as possible external drives on top of hot xboxs in enclosed cabinets for years and years now. Backup, and I would think failure rates would be too small to consider.

I'm mostly concerned about the power cord getting unplugged if, say, somebody is vacuuming around the area. On top of the usual "whole machine gets turned off" failure mode that happens maybe 10-20x a year in my neighborhood because of power loss there is a "machine is turned on but HDD is powered off" case.

Wouldn’t a NAS have the same problem, and wouldn’t a battery backup solve it? Genuinely curious

Personally I don't trust a NAS as far as I can throw it, or rather I'd use one the way I use Amazon S3.

My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly. If I want to move files to or from it I use SFTP. If I want to back files up to it I use rsync. I have Lightroom running pretty good on an external HDD, no way I'd take my chances running it on a NAS.

> Personally I don't trust a NAS...

> My home server has a ZFS array, the media server and some other programs access it directly.

This sure sounds like a NAS.

An appliance with the primary role of storage, and the ability to share files over the network are the distinguishing features for a NAS. Network support for iSCSI, SMB, NFS makes a NAS; sharing data exclusively over the media protocols (http, rtsp, etc) makes it a media server

By "NAS" most people mean "box they bought from someone to share files on a network" - think Qnap or Synology. They'll call a "NAS" that is home-built a server, even if they do basically the same thing.

To make it more fun, you'll have people refer to "I don't have a NAS, I run FreeNAS on my server."

There is no SMB or NFS, no 'network filesystem', though I could configure one if I want. I don't believe network filesystems are faat and reliable...

... Now that I think about i did have samba set up so I could watch 3d movies on my Meta Quest 3. But who cares if that is reliable?

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