🖕

Nothng official, sorry, wish I did!

Mostly personal experience. But that experience is also shared among a group of peers and friends in the SMB space where their clients think they can keep stuff on externals in an office safe only to find they’ve gone tits up nearly every time they pull them out a couple years later. And not the enclosures, the drives themselves - they all have external drive readers for just these kinds of circumstances.

In the enterprise you’d get laughed out of a datacenter for even suggesting cold drives for anything. Of course that’s based around simple bit rot concerns, and why file systems like ZFS use a methodology to test/verify bits on a regular basis.

If nothing else, that bit rot should be enough of a reason to not store data on cold drives. It’s not what drives were designed (or tested) to do.

Edit: Everything I’ve read over the years suggests failures happen as much from things like lubricants hardening from sitting as from bit rot. I’ve experienced both. I’ve seen drives that spin up after ten years but have numerous data errors, and drives that just won’t spin up, while their counterparts that have run nearly continuously are fine (well, their bit-rot was caught by the OS and mitigated). With a running drive you have monitoring, so you know the state.

Meh, you got a spare kidney…

Fine, I write an extensive bit of help with links to QNAP docs and a few other things, and you downvote.

Fine, how about I just delete it, and ya all go figure it out without my help.

I would definitely keep them warm, as in a running machine.

Drives on a shelf die more often than always-on drives.

I don’t even know what you’re saying at this point

Big time more expensive.

Who says college is better than no college?

What are your metrics?

Your questions are all binaries:simplistic, juvenile.

Like your question about dating and race: simplistic, bigoted and racist.

Careful, not all states have a castle doctrine, and really you don’t want the legal shitshow even in a Castle Doctrine state.

Better to deter than have to deal with that.

at an unrecoverable height

Ouch!

I’ve had way more USB C ports fail than micro, surprisingly, and that’s in perhaps a 5 year period vs 15 (and continuing) usage of micro.

I know C is supposed to be more robust, that just hasn’t been my experience.

My last phone was a 2017 model, I replaced it early 2025 with a Pixel 5. I have since bought 2 more Pixels (because they’re cheap) and keep one as a hot spare (boot it once a month to update) and one as a test bed.

I use a similar Dell Optiplex 7000 series.

It boots from the NVME, with an 8TB 3.5 disc for data, and a 500GB SD for my VMs. (Since spinning disks can idle much lower than SSD, getting my always-on VMs off the big drive lets it idle, with the SSD peak power being lower than the peak of spinning disk Adding the SSD increased net power slightly).

I use a splitter on the 12v power line for both of the drives. It’s fine.

This box only has an 80w power supply, and with both those drives hooked up it draws 20w at idle, and peaks at 70w when converting multiple videos simultaneously.

The manuall tells you what you can do without voiding the warranty.

Edit: Given it’s age, I’d pull the CPU cooler and replace the paste. It’s likely hardened by now. Mine was randomly rebooting because the cpu would overheat. Replaced the thermal paste and its been rock solid since.

I self host on a 5 year old Dell Optiplex Small Form Factor desktop.

I also have a Raspberry Pi, which has about 1/16 the performance of the desktop - Pi can be used for all sorts of stuff.

Yep.

My Pi is about 8 watts. Really hard to beat.

The SFF started at 12w, but swapping out the data drive for a much larger one pushed it up 5w. And now with 2 VMs always running (PiHole and a Windows VM), it hovers at 20w.

The ancient NAS (Drobo) sits at about 15w.

The number one thing you can do, by orders of magnitude, is to start with power-friendly hardware.

For example, my previous server was an old gaming machine. It’s lowest idle power consumption was 80 watts. That was with running an OS that permitted heavy power reduction control, and enabling every power saving feature in the BIOS.

Compare that to my 2019 Dell Optiplex Small-Form-Factor desktop I’m running as a server. The power supply is rated for 80 watts, MAX. It idles at 20w, peaks at about 70w when converting multiple videos simultaneously. This with an 8 TB enterprise drive for data.

So 1/4 the power draw when idle, where it spends perhaps 90%+ of its time. Even things like Resilio Sync and Syncthing don’t significantly raise CPU time.

Streaming with Jellyfin or Mediamonkey have nearly no CPU impact.

There’s nothing in heavier hardware you could tune to get down to 20w.

Yep.

Even if you aren’t religious (I’m not), I highly recommend reading the bible, and history since say the 1500’s.

Things were objectively MUCH worse prior to the 20th century.

Thief: Deadly Shadows

That’s not data redundancy - there’s still only one copy of your data.

Those are mitigations against loss of data due to loss of parity.

There’s still only ONE copy of your data.

Fine.

Pull 1 drive and see how redundant your data is while it’s resilvering.

RAID is NOT data redundancy. You still have a single copy of your data.

Tell me again how RAID is data redundancy?

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.html

RAID isn’t data redundancy, it’s an array of drives combined to form a single logical storage pool. It solves the problem of needing a single storage pool larger than the available drives. As such, it’s very sensitive to loss of a single drive.

At your storage size requirements (2 TB), RAID is unnecessary today.

Edit: Let me say it again for you downvoters-RAID is NOT data redundancy.

There is only ONE copy of your data in RAID (excepting mirroring). It’s why RAID now has double parity and hot spare drive capability.

RAID is for creating a single pool that’s larger than available drive size.

Go ahead and downvote in ignorance, and learn about data redundancy when your RAID fails.

RAID is NOT data redundancy - it’s DRIVE redundancy.

Take it from the source https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1987/CSD-87-391.html