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Comment by lateforwork | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately PCs have mechanical devices that give out after a few years. I am referring of course to fans. I use a Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and Samba as my NAS. It is cheap and reliable.

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I do too, but I’m looking to get proper solution soon. A Pi is a pretty lousy NAS. It can’t even power two drives so you can’t have redundancy unless you get a powered USB hub. And even then, I used one of those for a while and the drive connected to it prematurely failed. I think maybe because the power supply wasn’t stable.

I have a Pi4 running Raid 1 NAS with two SSD drives, and an externally powered USB hub. Unfortunately, it crashes every 6 months or so and needs a power cycle. Haven't been able to track down why, but I also suspect a power supply issue.

Initially I naively tried to run the two drives right off the USB3 ports in the Pi, and that basically crashed within a day - but that is of course because I was exceeding the power draw. An external hub and supply helped, but didn't fully fix the issue.

I use a powered USB hub, haven't had a problem in 5 years.

I've had more SD cards die on me than fans. I don't think any have died in the past five years, even.

Is there a particular brand you buy? Mine always fail after about 5 years… and I try a new brand each time. Not cheap fans, either; usually $15-20 per 120mm unit.

Noctua, but $20 might not be enough for the cheapest one depending where you live.

I’m not buying anything else and I’m also swapping out any non-noctua fan in my parts when possible (e.g. bought a scythe cooler due to ‘interesting’ dimensional constraints and swapped its fan with a noctua one.)

I always buy the cheapest PWM fans available in a nearby store (so usually Arctic) and I never had one fan fail on me in my life.

They almost never run 100%, though, and I have a recurring task set up to clean dust outta my filters, computers and servers.

OT, but what do you use to manage recurring tasks? I haven't found any solution that I love.

I tried using different sd cards with RPi but kept having issues with broken filesystem few months after, it was probably caused by bad power supply and electric surges.

You don't HAVE to boot RPi4+ from an SD card. RPi4 and RPi5 can boot from an external SSD just fine. I don't recall the last time I used an SD card in an RPi but it must have been years.

Yeah, that's what i have done, but it becomes bulky which doesn't always fits the project

I can’t remember replacing fans because they stopped spinning but I have EOLed them because the bearings went bad and they started to screech.

Don't use an SD card, then. It's that simple.

I have fans for the early 00s.

Also a fan is like $10?

Things which are more vital than that are the disks, power supply, rams.

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