Thanks, I hate it. Not that free esxi was super great but at least it was something

1. RAID for uptime, backups for data you care about. RAID(1+) will keep your data online when a disk fails, but backups are the real way to keep data around if shit hits the fan. For a personal media collection, you might be better served with a non resilient RAID0 (total failure if one drive fails) with a backup around to recover from when that happens. If you do e.g. a raid5 you lose 1 disk of capacity in exchange for 1 disk of resiliency, raid6 same but 2 disks. That gives you some safety but there are a lot of instances where those raids don’t save you from losing all your data. If you buy 4x 18TB drives, you could have 36TB from the 1st two drives and then backup to the other two drives.

2. There’s no specific type of drive to worry about unless you’re doing RAIDs especially with ZFS. Search shingle RAID rebuild for the biggest thing to worry about there.

3. Almost always, yes. Slow drives throttle the rest.

4. I’ve never used them but people say good things about synology most of the time. Everything comes with a cost and it’s hard to make any sensible recommendations without knowing your constraints; primarily your budget.

I get that’s the nature of searching for something I want to purchase

God damn it I hate the modern reality of online shopping. Make searching actually worth a damn again ffs

Driving two 4k monitors at 10b120hz is pretty overkill to use thunderbolt for, is kind of my point. Is anyone actually being limited by that?

Even with cameras, the storage generally isn’t that fast. CFexpress cards cant generally break 2GB/s, and even 8+k cameras generally record to that or maybe USB-C (and if you’re recording to a USBC device you’re probably just gonna use USBC instead of thunderbolt).

NVMe that can do sustained write speeds like that will be full in a few minutes, unless you’re offloading to a massive high speed array over 10+gbit networking it just kind of seems like why bother?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of going to faster interfaces for the sake of speed, but I have experienced almost zero real use of thunderbolt in real life, and I usually keep a pretty good eye out. My real question was mostly focused on whether there are people actually using thunderbolt and if they’re actually limited by 40gbps and I’m kinda just bitching at this point

Does anything even use thunderbolt 4’s bandwidth? About the only thing I’ve seen is external GPUs and even that is a ludicrously niche use case.

I’d be much more excited about a post about something using TB4 to its fullest. All I can think reading this title is “who cares?” Is someone going to make a reasonably priced and even remotely convenient 40gbps ethernet card for TB5? No. Do my NVME drives go past 40gbps? Generally not, but I could’ve seen use for fast drives plugged into tb4/5 at least. Is anyone using TB4/5 for datacenter interconnects where this speed would actually be useful? I doubt it.

Does anyone reading this post use tb4 on a daily basis and feel limited in any way?

Personal preference: Jellyfin instead of plex

Some that I run that you don’t seem to have anything for:

• Lancache (if you have several gaming PCs on the network or host any kind of lan party)
• surveillance camera software e.g. shinobi
• I see grafana, but other monitoring services like icinga, librenms, etc
• Mayan EDMS - I’ve found this really helpful as anything I get in the mail, I scan in, and this makes it all searchable and retrievable.
• There’s a whole hole you could dig if you start getting into home automation (I use home assistant)